catnapping

Hi

DS (9weeks old) loves to catnap during the day, like 30 min stints, at nights he sleeps tooo good, like 9pm til 3am appr, then til about 6ish then til 9am, then its more or less up for the day til night when the catnapping starts. i am breast feeding appr 2hr during the day, and at nights when he wakes up.. he is in his hammock during the day & cot at night ( refuses to sleep in cot during day naps)

I know that cat napping not good, any suggestions.. i would love for him to have longer sleeps during the day. maybe he is stil ltooo young, any ideas.

Maggie, by the sounds of it your son is only sleeping until his first sleep cycle and not geting through it. This is what my daughter used to do too, although she never slept that well over night. Come to think of it she still doesn't.

Is DS wrapped ?? I think basically the idea is to push him through that cycle, he needs to learn that after 30 minutes it is not time to wake up. He should be sleeping for longer stretches during the day. Like 2 to 3 hours at a time.

When he wakes do you go in and pick him straight up ? Maybe you could try just patting him on the bum, no eye contact and no talking other than the occasional shhhh. It will take time and lots of persistance but eventually it will happen.

Lots of luck to you hun.

Hi Maggie. Trish obviously has way more experience than me . . . I've only got one little baby! But I just wanted to let you know that our son has very rarely slept for more than 20 mins during the day, although he's pretty good at night. From the age of about 3 months he would - maybe once a week? sleep for 1 1/2 or 2 hours. I think some kids just don't need that much sleep - same as some adults don't need that much sleep. I guess the difference would be, if he wakes up happy after 30 mins or not. If not, you probably do need to help him get to the next cycle. I can't really offer much advice on that (which I know is really frustrating when you want answers). Sometimes in the evening, after I've put him to bed, he wakes after the 1st sleep cycle and, if I'm really quick, I can get him back to sleep by slipping the dummy in. I don't do anything else - no talking or stroking coz it seems to wake him more. And if I don't get there in time, he'll be to awake and I have to give him a BB.

Good luck and try not to worry about it too much, no matter what the ECN says. Once you just accept that what he does is what he does, it's a lot easier.

Its hard, my DD has cat naps for bout 30-45mins and may have one big sleep in the day for 1.5-2hrs but she doesn't do this everyday. Does your son still seem tired after these naps? I know with Ashleigh that if I try to resettle her it doesn't work cause she is wide awake and ready to play. All babies are different and some need to be resettled cause they need that sleep while others are refreshed after that sleep.

Tehya always seemed like she didn't need the sleep too, until I actually got her to sleep for that time and she was so much the better for it, as was I. Even though, for us it was only very short lived.

She is still now a very poor sleeper, will still wake several times at night and her daytime sleeps range from anything from a 40 minute nap to an occasional 2-3 hour sleep to none at all. No mater how hard I try.

It can get very tiring with a baby that won't rest for you. No matter what you do there is only so many ways to entertain a baby / toddler. The things I suggested inn my first post were things that were suggested to me during our week stay at Tresillian. Like I said, they did work for us for a certain ammount of time, then I became too relaxed with it all. Stupid me, although I found that it was much harder to stick to a more stricter routine when you have a houseful of other noisey children.