Baby just does not nap!

[Violet1984]

Hi all,
Looking for some advice for my 7 month old DD. She has been exclusively BF and over the last fortnight has started to take a bottle so I can prepare to go back to work. This is going quite well but my main concern is that she doesn't sleep. Like, hardly at all. Never has.
She wakes around 6:30 - 7am and despite my best efforts using all the tools I can think of (she's my second) I just cannot get her to nap. Today she slept for 10 minutes all day. This is quite common.
This then impacts on bedtime (around 7-7:30) as she's massively overtired. She also doesn't sleep through the night and I have to BF her to get her back to sleep. I also have to do this to get her to sleep in the evenings. Any ideas very welcome as I'm at the end of my tether! I've spoken to the HV and my GP in passing but no joy at all!

Another mum of a non-sleeper here.

At one end of the scale is hardcore sleep training, CIO etc. At the other, gentle earth mother, co-sleeping, Uber-attachment parenting. Somewhere in the middle is where you draw the line, and where you will be most committed to a plan. I'm still feeding to sleep, and riding out the regressions with a bit of co-sleeping (19m).
Is your concern about coping at work on naff all sleep, or whether or not they will sleep at childcare. For what it's worth, DD sleeps much better at nursery than she does for me due to a bit of sleep training/consistent routine/following what the other kids do.

Sounds like she's chronically overtired. Have you thought about sleep training? We found as soon as DD was sleeping through the night (8m) that napping got 100x better.

My dd was similar at 7 months - I heard that she should be awake for 2 hours max so everyday I was breaking my back trying to get her to nap at 10am while trying to occupy her older sister, all of us getting frustrated and grumpy.

What massively helped us was cutting down to one nap. Dd naps for an hour now after lunch, at about 1pm. It's still only 45-60 minutes usually, but she goes down happier and also stays happy until about 5:30 when she does get tired and grouchy, but I think that's pretty normal for most babies

Thanks for your replies!
We have thought about sleep training although I did it for one night when she was 5 months and got massively told off by the HV when i mentioned it to her the next day. I do think I may end up going down that route though. I've been co-sleeping for months and it doesn't really seem to be helping. She loves it but tbh I get no sleep at all. She will literally attach herself to me if she's close enough. I don't think I'd be able to maintain this when I go back to work in Jan. I'm a teacher and will be full time to it's pretty full on. Fingers crossed we can crack something by then!

Yeah, 5m is too young for any kid of sleep training, they're not developmentally capable of being trained so it's just distressing. At 7m you should be fine though, if i were you I'd work on getting her to fall asleep independently and then once she's cracked that, work on the night waking. You might find independent sleep helps with naps too.

Yes I'd suggest sleep training. I spent the first 6 months of DS life just getting him to nap, which was walking with him in the sling. He was a much happier baby once we got him napping and sleeping in the cot