7 month 30 min catnaps help!

[Wingingit07]

Hello!

My LO wakes at 6am and will only have 30 minute naps. His awake time is 2. 5 hours and weve tried to change this by increasing and decreasing, we do a nap routine and he sleeps in same place. Its even confused a sleep consultant. He goes to bed at 7pm.

So what im asking is what was your sleep schedule like when ypu had a cat napper!?

My DD is 7months and I’ve got the same problem (recently did a thread too). Wouldn’t mind, but she is clearly still tired, and then nights are being impacted. It’s also hard to fit in naps, milk, meals, and anything.

We usually do 2-3hr wake windows, and 3 naps per day, sometimes 4 and a later bedtime. Which never seems enough sleep. I’ve tried pram, cot, dark, light, car etc...

What I am currently doing and it worked (yesterday) not really as well today, is leaving her when she wakes to see if she will resettle. She does self settle at the start of the nap / bedtimes. I will go in and replace the dummy, but no interaction, then increasing the time between me going in and she has been falling back to sleep (about 15-20 minutes later). The other thing I am trying is as I know she will wake up at 30 minutes, going in 5-10minutes before she wakes, and turning on the dream sheep again, or gently nudging her, so she doesn’t wake, but this then resets the sleep cycle. I don’t know if this will work (or yesterday was just fluke), but am willing to try break the habit.

It’s because their sleep cycle is only 30-40minutes long, so they wake after the cycle, and can’t settle / transition into the next.

2.5h is too long awake when naps are 30 mins. As a general rule awake windows want to be around double nap length, give or take 15 minutes, and never more than 2h unless consistantly napping longer than 90 minutes.

Resetting to lengthen naps is a skill that has to be taught/learnt. Assuming you use in-cot settling to go to sleep (?) then get to baby before waking fully and use the same resettle method.

The key points for resetting are
(a) get to baby when moving from deep sleep into a light sleep. This might be a slight body movement - limb move, face scrunches up, hands fist. If baby actually wakes up (cries or opens eyes) it's too late and resetting will be much harder.
(b) have a settling/resetting method that disturbs baby as little as possible. If you have to pick up and rock or feed back to sleep you will probably wake baby up so pointless endeavour. Better to do a dummy reinsert and pat. Or if in a bouncer/pram a bit if movement to lull back to sleep.

Resettles will not work every time, but you should attempt to resettle at every nap. This requires you to be right there with baby and paying attention as they sleep, to spot that sweet-spot of light sleep before waking. The more you practice resettles the more frequently they'll be successful and over time less and less interaction from you needed to resettle.

(Not entirely sure why that would baffle your sleep consultant. It's really basic sleep hygiene. Sleep consultant sounds rubbish)