Baby on 23 hour day

[SenoraPostrophe]

Just wondering if anyone else has had to deal with a similar baby. Not expecting advice, though if you have any, I might try it!

ds is 8 months and on a 23 hour day. He has a fairly fixed routine in that he has a sleep of half an hour to an hour about 2 and a half hours after waking, then an afternoon nap of between 1.5 and 2.5 hours. He goes to bed about 12 hours after getting up usually, BUT he will only sleep for 11 hours (or less, and he sometimes wakes in the night too) so the following day is all earlier.

When he's at home I just make the whole day earlier every day, but at nursery, for some reason he will always have his nap at about 11, no matter what time he woke up. This means he has a shorter afternoon nap and is grumpy later. But not always. In order to deal with it, I try to get him to have a sleep after breakfast most days (and if he does, we start the day routine from when he wakes up) - he does this on about every third day. Or I give him a late afternoon nap, but that can be a pain as it involves lots of (increasingly violent) rocking in the pushchair: he won't nap in his cot at that time.

So anyway, i'm fed up with it. I think that giving up breastfeeding may help - other people can just rock him back to sleep at night, but I can't because he always wants a feed. Plus he might be more prepared to eat a proper tea if there's no bm on offer as an alternative, as he seems to think. But he won't take a bottle, so I'm not sure. I thought I might try giving him a bottle for breakfast one morning as that is when he feeds best (normally feed him in bed and doze off - I haven't had a good night's sleep in about 10 months).

Anyone have any other ideas?

Ferber says to keep babies/children/adults on track the best thing is to have very regular habits, so the daytime naps and bedtimes are at the same time, regardless of when they wake up (if possible - I know how impossible babies are to keep awake sometimes). My ds has never slept longer than 11 hours and now, even at three he sleeps 8pm - 7am every day very regularly, but he doesn't go to bed earlier than 8pm, no matter how tempted I am

I'd be happy with 11 hours sleep at night if he'd then stay up 13 hours and go to bed at the same time!

I could try making the daytime routine more fixed - as I say, he seems to do that at nursery anyway. At nursery he sleeps when he's so exhausted he can't stay awake, but at home I try to put him down earlier - do you think I should try and make the home routine more like the nursery one?

It's got to be worth a try! There is a theory that our internal clocks are all working on a run that is slightly shorter than 24hours, and if we don't have fixed times to do stuff we will 'free run' around the clock. They did experiments on people living in totally artificial surroundings (ie no natural light) and no clocks or watches and this is what they did. So it might well help to say that morning nap is at 10am and afternoon nap at 1pm (or whatever) regardless of waking time.

Thanks Aloha - the thing keeping me going is the thought that at least he isn't as bad a sleeper as yours was!

And at least dd still sleeps well. I'll try going for a more fixed routine I think.