Why do I suck at naps?

[londonmummy2019]

Ahhhhhhhh!!!

Feeling like a total failure at the whole nap saga! Christ! .... sorry just had to get that out! F$$k this !! Honestly!!! What the hell has happened to my life right now...

So DD 11 months. No idea if she's a good sleeper on the "average baby scale"...

Will go down between 8 and 8.30. Usually wakes 30 minutes after - goes back pretty quick and will then do 45 mins to an hour. Then usually back down for the night or another wake up at 11.30pm. Will sleep through to 8am. Or sometimes a wake up at 3am.... and that's bedtime/nighttime.

Naps are another story. After waking 8/8.30am or 9am has napped 90 mins at 12 noon...sometimes 2 hours. Recently however it's gone to having 10 mins, no nap at all or back to the crappy cat nap 30 mins. Another nap sometimes happens at 3/3.39 for 30 mins - usually in the car if I can be bothered to drive around the suburb looking like someone who has poor directions!!!

That's it. I'm so fed up. I get hardly any time to myself. Evenings are non existent and I end up going to bed fed up.

You aren't crap. Baby's probably working up to some big development in movement or language or teeth. Around a year, with my first, I got really tough on nap training her to one good post lunch nap. Not a clue if it will work for others but my firm and utterly boring routine was:
Up and out by 9.30 every weekday morning, physical activity, lunch, cot nap no later than 12.30 and resettled her by any means necessary till 2, snack, more physical activity, no 2nd nap, tea at 5, more physical activity, milk and in bed by 7.30.
It took about 6 weeks of really firm routine to make it stick but then we got 18 months of guaranteed naps till the day she decided she'd grown out of naps and just stopped daytime sleep.
Good luck. It passed. You Will find your way.

Thank you for your kind reply.

Feeling a little better today. DD did a 90 min nap yesterday at noon. She also slept well overnight...no early wake ups.

She does seem quite fixated on trying to crawl forward on the playmat and rolling about more....

I like your idea of the one long nap. DD can take or leave a second nap really. If she does nap it's usually 90 mins to 2 hours. It just hasn't happened in about a month!!!

Gosh it's so hard but also so rewarding when you see them achieve great things...

I just wrote a massive reply but dont know where it went.

I have no advice but huge sympathy. Naps have been my life for 10 months. I read somewhere that the average parent drives 1100 miles in the first year getting their baby to sleep. All I can say I'd that lots of people must not have driven at all because I have lived in my fucking car.

It's taken over my life and headspace. It actually enrages me!!
So if you want to vent - I'm all ears

Thank you! x

Although I had success on the 90 minutes nap the other day... I've had two awful nights now with my DD.

Usually a very good sleeper a night but the last two she has been waking at 10pm and not going down till 2am!! Crying and fussing. It was awful. I feed to sleep and she was comforted by that but every time I tried to put her down she cried it woke after 10 mins fussing.

Yesterday she was chewing on her Sophie Giraffe madly....fussed over breakfast but did eat all weetabix and fruit...

I feel very anxious as I was trying to sort the day naps and now I feel like there's a night problem now

She has four teeth - four bottom and four top although they aren't all completely out. I thought that when they broke the surface which was a couple of weeks ago now - I was in the clear.

I feel very anxious at the moment as I feels like the worst two nights since she was born.