Nap Help
We recently had a breakthrough with G and his overall sleep habits. He's been going to sleep on his own in his crib for his naps! Amazing for a kid that up until last week we were lucky if he took one short nap a day in his swing. Seriously nothing we did got him to sleep. So this is amazing progress.
Although I am so grateful for this progress I'm now not sure what to do about the length of his naps. The last two days have consisted of three 30-40 minute naps and one 60-90 minute nap. I think ideally he should be taking three naps a day that are anywhere from 45-90 minutes each, right? So now I'm just stuck on how to get him to sleep longer.
I wouldn't care so much except he is obviously still tired when he wakes up. I go in and try to soothe him back to sleep, but he just becomes hysterical. I guess the questions are 1. How do I encourage longer naps? 2. If he takes short naps should I just give him more naps during the day? Or does that just make it worse?
omg, who ever would have thought this would be so complicated. Oh, also we're transitioning to the crib tonight. Wish us luck!
Re: Nap Help
Personally I think sleep is the most complicated/difficult part of parenting and I now encourage every 1st time parent I know to get some good sleep books and read those while pregnant instead of pregnancy books.
3 naps is more standard because that's how most kiddo's days work out but I think that overall total sleep time is the most important factor. According to the Ferber book at his age, you should be looking at 11 1/2- 13 1/2 hours of total sleep.
Andrew was a cat napper, for those reasons I also mainly held him, or laid down with him for naps. Not knowing any better I certainly created some big sleep problems at an early age for him. I don't know how much you've read about sleep cycles ect so ignore me if you know all this. For naps they have a transition either at around 30 or 45 min, where they wake a little and then fall back to sleep. A great sleeper does this with little disruption at all, you might see them move around a bit, where some kids will cry a tad and shift around but work it out and go back to sleep, then there are kids who are so startled to notice the world around them that no way do they want to keep on sleeping.
I've found with my kids that if they wake up happy they slept enough and if they wake up crying then they didn't. Not always so easy to get them back to sleep if they hadn't gotten enough so sometimes it became making the next nap better. If you think that he's getting enough sleep in each individual nap and he's reasonably happy when he wakes and he's in a good mood throughout the day then I'd say just go with it.
If you think that he's waking up at a transition because he can't get himself back to sleep and he needs more sleep than I would start easy and work your way up with him.
1. I'd determine if he needs/wants more sleep by seeing if he'll fairly easily go back to sleep if you pick him up and rock/swing/shush/feed/paci him. If he goes back pretty easily (even if he won't let you put him back down to sleep) then I would get aggressive about stretching the nap.
2. Be right by his door or with the monitor as you approach the 30 minutes mark, then as soon as you hear him pop in and pat him on the rump/back, rub his head, pop the paci in, ect. If you can get him to make the transition without really realizing you are there, without waking up very much you might get lucky enough that his body learns to just glide right through it without you at all as he gets used to more sleep out of each nap.
3. If he fusses but doesn't cry don't go in at all. Hopefully he'll fuss himself back to sleep but if he starts to cry hard then go in. He might have worn himself out enough that he will go back to sleep easily for you at this point.
4. Once you find that you feel confident that he both needs and wants the additional sleep and is crying because he's angry that you won't help him then I'd go straight to CIO at the transition.