6 month old fighting naps

[sunseaandme]

Sorry I know baby sleep is so commonly posted on here but looking for some advice nearly 7m old DS has started fighting naps the last couple of weeks. I used to be able to rock him to sleep in my arms with a dummy and he would fall asleep fairly quickly. Now it's just not working, he is spitting dummy out thrashing around for ages. his wake windows are around 2-2.5 hours but usually he starts showing he is tired after just 90 mins or so, but surely he shouldn't need a nap after 90 mins? His first nap of the day today for example was for 1 hr 30 mins then an hour and a half later he is acting tired again and grumpy. His first nap is often long but the rest of his naps he is wide awake after 35 mins no matter what I do. His night sleep is unaffected and he is sleeping from 8 until 5am and then usually has a bottle and goes down for another hour approx . any advise appreciated

This sounds exactly like how my daughter was! We removed the dummy and rocking to sleep and it was rough at first but it helped tremendously. If he's getting cranky so quickly it could be that he's just really bored and needs a change of activity to stimulate him further to reach those wake windows.

Mine dropped to two naps at 6 months. I’ve never fought him for it, I reckon life is too short to be trying to put babies to sleep, so he sleeps when he’s tired. I start offering a nap when he’s showing tired cues and if he doesn’t go to sleep easily we try again in an hour.

@SleepyLittleMonkey how did you drop the rocking to sleep ? I don't think that would be possible for him if I lay him down in crib when he's awake he either just cries or just lays there wide awake staring around.

I sleep trained for the night sleeps but for the day naps I used wake windows and just put her down when she was really tired but not overtired. She would settle quite well. My bigger drama was the dummy because she'd spit it out mid nap and then wake up realising it wasn't there.