10 week old naps

[AIFK]

Hi everyone, my little girl really fights naps even though she is clearly tired and needs them. She sleeps well through the night in her cot next to our bed and after a bedtime routine and swaddle goes does pretty easy. However she fights all naps in the day. She has never napped in the cot and cries as soon as she is out down in it, she used to sleep on me in “contact naps” quite well or in a sling but even that is a battle now and she knows when the nap time routine is starting and cries before we even start! At the moment I’m leaving about 1.5 after she wakes up before trying for the next nap on me but she is getting herself into such a state it’s getting harder and harder and she is getting more and more over tired. She also refuses completely to nap past 5pm no matter how hard I try! I’ve moved her bedtime earlier to 8pm (used to be 9pm) as she is so tired by then but the evenings are awful as she is so tired and crying the whole time. Anyone have any ideas or will this just resolve itself? I would love for her to nap in her crib solo as at the moment I’m not getting a moment in the day as we are spending it fighting naps and her being upset . Thanks 😊

I would say lo is overtired and I would shorten wake times for a few days to see if that helps catch up.

Thanks for your reply, would you suggest aiming for an hour then? It’s just so tricky as naps are with me! I can’t get anything done at all 🙈

It's completely normal for contact naps at this age. Forget everything and make a pack lunch. and a flask. I would aim to start at 45 to 50 minutes start settling lo.

I wore my DS2 at this age pretty much all evening and afternoon
Allows you to get stuff done and they can sleep next to you.

Thank you, she’s just so nosy that wearing her is hard as she is looking around the whole time and not sleeping! What age does the contact napping end? Anyone have any success with putting them down once they are fully asleep? All these posts I read of 2 month olds napping 2 hours by themselves in the day is making me depressed 🙈 I also don’t want to start a habit I can’t undo which seems to already be the case!

I would start getting her down for the first nap about an hour after she wakes.

Start adding lots of sleep cues in now. You can use a dummy, bottom patting, white noise, a comforter.
If you start using all these things at the moment while you do contact naps, you will be able to use them to transfer her to nap in other places later.

Will she nap in the pram? I would probably do the first nap as a contact nap as it's important to get that one in, then after 1.5 hours from waking put her in the pram, dummy/white noise/comforter and go for a walk. Pram nap is a good stepping stone to go from contact naps to cot naps.

I would also try to feed on waking rather than feed to sleep. So follow a rough cycle of wake-feed-play-sleep throughout the day.

If she wakes from her last nap at 5, I'd aim for a bedtime of 7.30.

She hasn’t napped in the Pram in the past she just stares eyes wide open even when I cover her over! so I haven’t tried in a long while, it is prob worth revisiting now she’s a bit older though. Would you suggest making all other naps contact or sling then and just try one a day in the pram? Should I put her in the cot or down once she is asleep for any of them? She usually wakes after 10mins when I’ve tried this before 😫

Also, yes I use some sleep cues we have a dummy, patting and shushing and white noise etc for naps (if she isn’t in the sling) and bedtime. And I do try and feed when she wakes up rather than before sleep time (as long as she hasn’t taken an age to sleep or missed her nap completely from fighting it!)

My boy was a bit like this, mostly contact napped and was breast fed to sleep until 6mo when he self settled.
If I could go back and change things I'd try and get him settling in the cot with my help e.g shush and pat bottom with a comforter or rub tummy/forehead till they drift off.
You might need to get the overtiredness under control over the next couple of days by doing some decent contact naps but you could start introducing shush pat, comforter etc. With the contact nap and then the cot won't be so different.
Good luck!

Probably not much point trying to put her down once you've got her to sleep if she wakes after 10 minutes. Ideally you want them to fall asleep where they're going to stay asleep.

I'd probably try to get the overtiredness sorted and into a bit of a rhythm for naps before working on getting her to nap in the cot.

You could do something like
awake at 7am and feed
8am into the sling with a dummy, white noise and pat her bottom as she falls asleep
when she wakes from that one eg 9am feed and get both of you changed and dressed.
Into the pram with dummy/comforter/white noise and out for a walk by 10.30am
Even if it takes 20+ minutes for her to fall asleep I'd persevere with it and then once asleep keep walking for at least 45 minutes.
Then you can hopefully head home and either bring the pram in or leave it by the back door. Sit down and relax and hopefully she will sleep another hour, but anytime she starts to stir just rock the pram again!

Pram naps are great at this age as once they are used to sleeping there you don't have to go out for a long walk, you can just rock to sleep in the hallway or garden.

Once you've hopefully got one long nap in it's fine for the afternoon naps to be shorter sling naps. Or if you have a bouncer chair or swing you can try using them for naps too.

Only once you've got her napping regularly and hopefully having say 4 naps a day using all the comforters and patting would I try having naps in the cot.
Better to have plenty of good naps in the pram, sling, bouncer etc than worry too much about the cot.

At that stage you could then try taking her to her room at the established nap time, putting the white noise on and rocking/bottom patting til drowsy then putting her down and continuing to shush and bottom pat til asleep.