I am just looking for advice on some sleep issues that have only recently arisen in my LO. He is 3.5 mo old, born at full term. He was always a great sleeper and started sleeping 11-12 hrs at night around 6 weeks. He is growing well so I feel like that is safe and of course, it kept Mommy and Daddy very happy! We started out on a great nap schedule, keeping him roughly on a 3-4 hour cycle - awake for 1-1.5 hours, then down for a nap. (awake for feeding at 6am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm, bedtime at 530-6pm). This worked fine because he usually woke up right on time for his next nap, and if not we would wake him up. He was never super fussy or anything when we woke him up. We do a sleep-feed-wake time-sleep routine.

This schedule has really evolved into a much more disorganized day. First we stopped waking him from his longer naps, since he was growing so well, I felt like he did not NEED to be awakened and he didn't sleep so long most of the time anyway. The past two weeks,, his naps have varied wildly from 30 minutes to 3 hours, with no consistent patterns regarding time of day that we can discern, and mostly shorter naps. He used to fuss for maybe 5-10 minutes when put down before going to sleep, which was fine. Now he sometimes screams for 30-60 minutes and occasionally longer at bedtime. He has also been waking at night at random times, and not putting himself back to sleep like he used to. Usually we just reswaddle him and he goes back to sleep but sometimes he is rooting like crazy so we just feed him. We never keep him awake longer than 1.5 hours, during the day, and try to watch for him quieting down and put him down then, before he gets overtired.

Please help - I feel like our great sleeper is becoming sleep deprived, and I don't want that to happen. I don't mind CIO but it feels wrong that he fusses for up to an hour multiple times per day when we are trying to be consistent. How can we get him back on track? What are we doing wrong? How did you put your baby on a schedule that is the same every day, rather than just waiting a certain amount of time between naps?

If you read through that whole post - thanks