Hi Kathok

This is what I've found with my 4.5 month old. If I misread her signs and feed her when she's only a little hungry then she will have mini-feeds all day and in turn, mini-sleeps all day. It's a bit easier for me to know when she's had a mini-feed because I bottle feed. But perhaps the 5 naps a day with your daughter is being caused by her not having a full feed which means she has a shorter sleep. So now I make sure that if she's a bit whingy, I'll move her somewhere and show her something new because sometimes she's not hungry she's just bored.

But definitely no point trying to get a hungry baby to sleep and sometimes instead of doing feed, play, sleep she wants to do feed, play, feed, sleep. I just go with the flow.

I also found that if I tried too hard to get her to sleep because I thought she 'should' have a sleep, we would both end up frustrated. So if she's in her crib looking wide awake, I get her out. If she's looking sleepy but frustrated that she can't get to sleep, then I'll give her a BIG, long cuddle and say lots of soothing words in a soft voice like "ahhhhhh .... poor baby" over and over again. She seems to like this and it calms her down a lot. If she's not calming down, then I give her another feed but that's kind of the last thing we try.

On the wrapping, I think yes, start gradually. When I used to wrap, I would also say "shhhh ... sleepy time now" so over time she started to associate the words with sleep as well as the wrapping. But because she was getting out of her wraps and waking herself up, I just started wrapping her legs and then stopped altogether because the words alone would work.

I think the verbal stuff is very important; or at least it seems to have worked a treat for us. Sometimes if I hear her thrashing around in the middle of the night, I just say "shhhh ... sleepy time" and I can actually hear her stop what she's doing, give a big sigh and go back to sleep.

On the night feeding, I guess trust your judgement. If she's hungry, feed her but if she just needs a cuddle then try that first. Again, it was easy for me to work out which she wanted because I was bottle feeding so if by the time I'd picked her up and brought her down to the kitchen with me to make up a bottle she was asleep on my shoulder ... there was my answer.

Oh, and forgot to say that we did the whole self-settling thing VERY gradually. In the early days I was very strict about only comforting her enough to get her relaxed or in a light sleep but not into a deep sleep. Sometimes I would have to go back three or four times - but like I said, I wouldn't keep on doing this unless I could see that she was actually tired, not just me thinking that she 'should' be tired. It would have been easier to rock her fully to sleep but I kept to my resolve and it did work a treat and she now sleeps beautifully. But it took a lot of perserverance.

Good luck with it all! And hope that made sense. Have serious Ramble Head on today!