Getting it wrong every day - 3 to 2 nap transition

[Carnivalwing]

Hello everyone. I’d be so grateful for advice. I’ve used mumsnet since I became pregnant with DD, but so far found all the advice I’ve needed in old threads. I’ve looked, but can’t find the answer to my question about the hell that is the 3-2 nap transition. Please, please help me! I am desperate and exhausted.

DD is 7 months old. She self settles to sleep for naps and at bedtime. Until recently, we’ve been in a reasonable routine with naps and nighttime sleep. Roughly -

7.15 wake
9.15 nap (1h20)
1pm nap (1h20)
5pm nap (20-30m)
7.30 bed

She would usually wake twice overnight for a feed and go straight back to sleep with no problems. She has never slept through the night and I have given up hope that she ever will!

However, in the last two weeks her awake time has clearly stretched and she is somewhere between needing 2 and 3 naps. I can get her down for her first nap within 2.5 hours or even 2 if she’s had a really rough night. But for the other naps, she is awake for almost exactly three hours before falling asleep, no matter what I do. This just isn’t leaving room for a third nap. I’ve tried following more rigid routines with her in the past and waking her from naps, but she absolutely hates this (understandably!) and gets upset and seems even more tired, so I don’t really want to resort to that.

I am perfectly happy for her to drop that nap as she’s getting plenty of day sleep during the first two, so I’ve been trying the 2-3-4 routine for around a week. However, she can’t seem to handle being awake four hours before bed. She seems perfectly happy - goes down to sleep happily and is in a great mood before bed (this might be because she is just generally a cheerful little soul). But the impact this has had on her sleep tells me that (I think) she is overtired. She has started waking and crying within the first hour of sleep, and more often than not she’s awake for two hours in the middle of the night. She falls asleep for less than ten minutes and wakes again, over and over, before eventually passing out after around two hours from when she first woke. Nothing I do seems to help her get back to sleep before two hours has passed.

Could anyone please offer some advice? I am so tired and so is she, but I really don’t know what to do to help her. I feel like I’m failing both of us every day at the moment.

Bed earlier?

I’ve thought about putting her to bed earlier, but then surely she’d just wake up earlier. That’s not a problem for me (if she isn’t awake for two hours overnight that is), but surely the next day would then be a longer with more time to fill, but still not really enough time for a third nap... so then she’d be even more tired by bedtime on that day? I could be working this out all wrong, I’m not completely functional at this point!

Similar age and we’ve just moved from 3 to 2 by pushing lunch nap from 12:30 to 1 (2.5 hours to 3:30) and bringing bedtime half an hour earlier to 7.
Maybe try a longer lunchtime nap?

So:
7 wake up (sometimes earlier which is a pain in the bum)
9-10 nap
1-3:30 nap
7 asleep

Same stage here OP! It's tough but I know from my eldest that it will get easier...

I have read a lot about the 2-3-4 routine but I don't think it actually works for many babies. Two hours of awake time first thing often isn't enough. And four hours of awake time before bed is often too long. Also, if you add it up, that's only 9 hours total awake time. So you're asking your baby to sleep 15 hours in 24. I don't think many babies actually need that much sleep. The average baby of this age (according to the NHS website) sleeps around 14 hours at this age.

Can you spread out the earlier awake times and then force a quick catnap later in the day by taking her out for a walk in the sling/pram? Or a quick drive in the car?

Or could you switch between 2 naps and 3 naps for a bit, so 3 naps if she's had a bad night and 2 naps if she's had a good night?

Remember that all kinds of things are happening at this age which can impact sleep. Teething, learning to sit up/crawl, trying new foods. So don't blame everything on your schedule, a lot of this is likely to be outside of your control.

Thanks for the replies.

@ConfusedPanda it’s so rough isn’t it. I’m up now with DD. She’s been in and out of sleep since she woke for a feed at 3.30. She has just settled again, hopefully this time it sticks. When this happens it’s usually just a waiting game - eventually after two hours she gets tired enough to fall asleep. Not without waking the whole house up first though...

I’ve done what you and @Albta suggested, shifted her wake times as 2 hours isn’t long enough in the morning, and 4 hours is too long before bed. So she’s doing awake times of around 3/3.5/3.5 hours. Yesterday she napped perfectly and then the night was good! Two quick wake ups and slept 11.5 hours overnight in total! I hoped we’d cracked it.... but then today (I suppose it’s actually yesterday now) she had a very long first nap and only 40 minutes for the second nap so I shortened her awake time before bed to 3.25 hours and she went down fine, first feed also fine. Unfortunately, it’s been downhill from there! I’m wondering if it’s because she needed the more restorative sleep later in the day. Poor thing I just can’t get it right for her.

@ConfusedPanda I’m really struggling now to get any kind of third nap in. She just won’t sleep until she’s been awake three hours. A couple of days recently where I tried to go back to three naps I ended up driving for an hour to get her to sleep but she didn’t drop off until 5.45! So then had to wake her pretty soon after she fell asleep to have any hope of a reasonable bedtime. One of the nights was good, the other was not great but not the worst. I think she just needs two and a half naps...

You said you remember this with your eldest... any idea how long it lasted?! She’s stayed down, so going to try and get to sleep for a few minutes before it’s time to get up again

@carnivalwing it all got much easier around 8 months. There were still good days and bad days of course, but at that point it became easier for the baby to stay awake for longer stretches, he could do 4 hours by that point. Of course they're all different so I wouldn't like to promise it will be the same for you, but fingers crossed!

Thank you, that’s good to know. I’ve got in my head that it might just be a difficult month as she adjusts. Hopefully as she gets a bit older she’ll just adjust naturally. I never thought I’d be longing for the days where she just had two quick feeds!

I feel you. My babe 6.5months and needs three naps but I can't manage it! Not enough time in the day. The sleep books I've read suggest an earlier bedtime if you don't get enough naps in. They suggest that early bedtime doesn't actually equal early wake up, in fact the opposite. And that's true in my experience. I aim for a 6.15pm / 6.30pm bedtime if they haven't had nap 3. The books also suggest 2 nap day timings to be 9.30am -10.30 nap and 1.30-3pm nap.

@enidmatilda do you find that your baby starts their night time sleep ok if you put them down that early?

I've tried this a couple of times and she just treats it as a nap anyway and wakes up after 45 minutes 🤪

Currently in the hell of 3-2 nap transition. We are going through a stage of early waking at 5:30 (used to wake for the day at 6:30) and I think it’s because he is having too many day naps (has 1.5 hours in the morning, another 1 hour over lunch and then 30 mins around 3:30/4pm and bed for 7/7:30).... he sleeps through from when we put him down but is now waking early. I’ve tried feeding him, having the heating on for an hour around 3am in case he is getting chilly, I’ve even tried rocking back to sleep which I haven’t done for months... nothing works. So I give up at 6am and get us up for the day.

This just means he is ready for his first nap at 8am 😣 and it’s messing the day up and he definitely needs the 3rd nap to see him through to bedtime because he has woken so early in the morning!

We had a few good days of 2 nap days but no idea what I did to make it a success, as it has then followed this early waking and back to 3 naps....!

Thankfully I’m past all this so no useful advice but don’t be so hard on yourself, you’re not ‘failing’ or ‘getting it wrong’. It’s really difficult, none of them have read the manuals, it can be really disheartening but honestly it’s not a failing. You’ll come out the other side and this will be a distant memory - hope things fall into place soon

@Ktay and everyone else, thanks for your kind words. It’s so hard when everyone else’s babies are sleeping through and my baby looks knackered and can’t get back to sleep even though she wants to. It makes me feel like I must be doing something wrong! But at the same time I know I have a lot less control over it all than I think I do/than I would like!!

The past 3 out of 4 nights have been better - 2 quick wake ups again. She’s mostly been on two naps a day spreading the awake times so that she’s awake three hours then 3.5 and 3.5 again before bed. Roughly.

@anonnancy could you try a bit of an earlier bedtime? Think @EnidMatilda suggested this and I’ve been less concerned about putting her down earlier some nights. Bed time has been between 6.45 and 7.30 recently but the majority of the time she seems to sleep til around 7, sometimes wakes around 6 but that’s rare. I’ve been going off a combination of awake times (so no more than 3.5 hours after last nap until bed), total awake time for the day (think this should be around 10 hours) and how much DD has napped that day. It might be worth trying for two naps with a bedtime around 6.30 if DS is up at 5.30. At least then you could go to bed a bit earlier and the wake up wouldn’t be so bad...!

I’ve also been reading a little bit about the intuitive sleep programme that basically says that babies don’t have such rigid sleep needs, and not to stress so much if they don’t nap for as long as the books say in the day. That’s been quite helpful. Strangely, DD has only napped for two hours in total for the past two days, which is less than she normally has. She’s been in good spirits, however, and has slept better overnight (still the two wake ups but no long awake periods). So maybe there is something in that!

@ConfusedPanda I know what you mean about them treating an early bedtime as a nap. Sometimes mine does that but I think sometimes it's because she's hungry as she doesn't feed v well if overtired at bedtime and it hasn't been ages since feed before. Sometimes she sleeps the normal amount from early bedtime (she doesn't sleep through yet; so maybe best not listening to a word i say )