Napping and feeding advice please

[Jottie123]

First time poster so apologies if this is in the wrong place! Im a first time mum to a 15 week old. After a very rough few weeks at the beginning we seem to have got night time reasonably sorted, she sleeps about 9-8/9 with one feed in the middle which I’m pretty pleased with at this stage. However, her day time naps are awful. I’m lucky if she has 3 naps a day and they’re only ever about 20/30 minutes long. I try and put her down in her bed for at least one of them and she will also sleep on me, in the pushchair and in the car but only ever for a max of 30 minutes. Is this normal? Any suggestions on how I can lengthen her naps a little bit? We EBF and I try and roughly follow sleep, eat, play so she doesn’t feed to sleep every time but sometimes I give up and resort to that. I’m sure it varies massively but how many times a day were you feeding at this point? Sorry for the lengthy post!

I would just follow her cue if she's not tired just leave her my wee one was like that since she was born would be awake all day and only wake once at night for a feed and then slept through since about 3 1/2 months old if she's not crying or that a would just leave her or try and see if she's maybe not full enough and try more feed i always put an extra oz or 2 in my wee ones bottle that way it was there if she decided she was a bit more hungry x

Short naps are normal at her age although some babies will do long ones. Many won't learn to link their sleep cycles in the daytime until 5/6 months I think. As her night time sleeping is good you might not want to tinker with it too much although 4 naps of that length at her age with a wake window of around 90 mins might be better.

Around 5 months it might be worth starting to try and help her elongate one of the naps, usually the lunchtime one, and dropping to 3 naps a day. This often involves catching them at the end of one cycle and helping them stay asleep through patting/shushing/use of dummy etc. They can usually stay awake for 2/2.5 hours between naps at this age. The only way we achieved the long nap was to start by using the buggy or car to get her into the routine of a long middle of the day nap (she would sleep well in the car and we could use the buggy to get her to go into another cycle through rocking), then we moved the long nap to the cot after a few weeks of this routine once her body clock had got used to it. It took about a week to get her to manage it in the cot.

All this said, some babies just don't nap a lot and she does sleep a lot at night. If she is happy and contented in the day and settles easily at night it may be the routine you've got works for her at the moment. Just be aware it might all change and you might need to adapt it as she gets older! 4 months ish is when sleep can often become problematic unfortunately.