Any help please! 12 month baby still not sleeping?

[Dfjackson]

Any advice or help please.
12 month baby, EBF, still in my room but 90% sleeps in cot (building work going on so no feasible yet to move to own room)
I use different tog sleep bags. Baby not quite taking to a ‘lovey’ / comforter yet.
We do feed to sleep but this doesn’t seem to make any difference - one minute can go 6 hours and settle throughout sleep cycles the next just awake every 2-3 hours

Typically wakes around 7am and bedtime usually around 8pm.
Two naps -
around 10am and 2pm/3pm depending on wake up from first nap.
Roughly 2 hours of daytime sleep usually.

I’ve tried getting up earlier 6am onwards to bring bedtime earlier, tried one nap which did give us a 6 hour stint at night but she was so sad and awful throughout the day, tried getting rid of the feed to sleep which made no difference

please any help?

Typical 12 month routine:

7am wake and breastfeed if needed. Keep this wake time consistent

8am breakfast - porridge and
a cup of milk or water, some blueberries

between 9.30 - 10.30am small nap of around 20 mins. Wake your baby after 20 mins. Absolutely not longer than 30 mins.

12 noon - lunch with protein eg salmon with rice or spaghetti bolognese.
full fat Greek yoghurt for dessert and some banana if still hungry.

1-3pm nap

3pm milk and small snack eg rice cakes

5pm tea eg minestrone or pasta with veggie sauce

6pm bath

6.45pm feed and bed. Try not to feed all the way to sleep.

This sounds very normal (not dismissing how hard it is) and as though your baby is doing a good job of being a baby! I suggest doing whatever you can to survive/keep going and wait it out. My 13mo wakes every 1-2 houra and at times it drives me mad, and at others I’m better at accepting that it’s just what she needs at the moment. Keeping an eye on how much sleep they get in 24 hours and if it is at the top end of normal and waking frequently then it may be worth trying to aim for less as an experiment. Lyndsey Hookway is a paediatric nurse, health visitor and lactation consultant and a wonderful expert in all things baby sleep and breastfeeding. Check out one of her books or her instagram

I’ve been through this, it’s so exhausting. After dragging my heels for ages I finally got help from a sleep consultant. Turns out we needed to do a nap transition and do some sleep training to get her to sleep independently. I was so skeptical but it only took 3 days to crack and she was then sleeping 11-12 hours at night. Life changing! So there is hope for you - some babies just need to be taught how to sleep!

Could you let me know what you changed with naps? Timing or dropped to one?
Thanks x

Our sleep consultant worked with us to transition to one nap very slowly by moving them both later and making the morning one longer and the afternoon one shorter until it just dropped off.

But the key for us was getting rid of the feed to sleep association by doing some sleep training. It was great to have the support so we knew what to do.

Have you thought about getting help?

Thank you that’s really helpful because my LO is almost doing this herself?
today for example she didn’t get up until 07:30 (her night was awful so allowed a little longer) then she had a 2 hour nap at 10am! I had to wake her up up or she would have gone longer I think! Then her afternoon nap was completely pushed back I had to wake her at 20 minutes so she still had enough sleep pressure for bedtime!
So that first nap she keeps fighting for it to be later and sleeps for a while and it then keeps pushing the afternoon one so late.

If I’m completely honest I don’t even know where to start with the sleep consultant, is it expensive? I also don’t know how I would cope allowing my LO to cry :( x

Ah I’m glad that my info was helpful!

The consultant I used only charged me £125 which I thought was pretty good value. She was great at tailoring the plan to my tolerance for crying as that was also a concern I had. Happy to pass on her details if useful?