Naps suddenly shortened again with Ferber

[Megank1989]

I’m on day three of Ferber after initially doing pick up put down to get her used to not falling asleep in her arms. Happy with how it’s going at night - night one went down after 17 minutes of check-ins, three wake ups in the night but only one was a struggle to put her back down. Night two went down very easy woke up around two did fight at this time took until about three but both nights she’s woken up a more reasonable time around 6 to 630 After weeks of 5 am starts. And it’s frankly a miracle she’s had full nights in her own cot after nine months of sleeping at least part of the night. However, the past two days her naps have shrunk back down to 30 to 40 minutes. After pick up put down, she was sleeping one to 2 hour stretches in her cot and it’s just stopped. Anyone else experienced this? Will they get long again? I’ve been doing further for naps as well, but haven’t really needed to do much as she has Beautifully with maybe a couple of minutes protest. Really hope I haven’t traded one sleep problem for another!

How old is she? They can only sleep so much so if she’s sleeping all the way through she might need less nap time.

Yeah if she's sleeping more at night it makes sense she's napping less? Can't have it both ways.

9 months. I’d like to get her to bed later to reduce night hours but the short naps are scuppering things!

Has it been really warm where you are? DS' naps would go haywire in the heat

I consider myself a bit sleep schedule obsesser (3rd baby now who has been napping well and sleeping through the night since 6 months) and I’m a big believer in working around the sleep requirements for age. So for example, a 9 month old is meant to have 12-15 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. So for my little one I would deduct her night sleep through (about 8pm-8am) then that left 3 hours for nap. For the naps you need to make sure to then follow the wake windows for their age. So a wake window for a 9 month old is 2.5-4 hours. So if they are up at 8 then their nap needs be begin between 11am to 12pm. So that could be nap one for perhaps 2 hours and then a 45 min cat nap 4 hours after that.

I think most people have their babies up earlier than 8 am so that would mean their schedule runs earlier but in terms of total hours this is what I go by. In general we have been huge believers of sleep begets sleep and our previous 2 have kept a nap until they were 3-3.5 years old.

Issue at the moment is the last wake window, which is stretching to 5 hours! Maybe if I try to keep her up longer in between nap 1 and 2 it might help.