Neither of my kids have been great nappers. My 12 week old mostly naps for 30-45 minutes. Occasionally we'll get a 1-2 hour nap. I stressed out so much about napping and sleep with my older one and I just don't feel like putting myself through it again. For the most part, DS is a happy baby. But everything I read talks about how important sleep and naps are, how he should be napping 2 hours at a time, etc. Maybe my kid is just a cat napper?
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I'm trying to be very zen about sleep with my little guy because I found that the worry and stress were actually worse than the not sleeping when it came to his big sister. Having said that, i have just met with our Plunket Nurse to get some advice to help him nap better so he's not overtired and cranky by tea time!
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I tried to follow his cues and we never really put him on a schedule. But on the flip side, he's always been very consistent, and found his own schedule.
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I don't anymore. With my 1st, I stressed so much for several reasons. I was a 1st time mom, who is a natural worrier and a rule follower. Everywhere you turn it talks about how much sleep babies should be getting! My good friend told me babies sleep so much. It's important because it's when they grow. Liars! Her child loves sleep and that's why she slept so much. I thought for sure my son would be negatively implacted by his little sleep (only cat napped until he was about 8-9 months old). Nope, he's consistently 75%-90% for height and weight and he's met every milestone on time or early.
So now I don't worry at all and I break most of the sleep rules. My son co sleeps and I rock the other to sleep every night. And guess what? He sleeps through the night about 75% of the time.
It is so much nicer not to worry!
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Yep. I had to learn to ignore everything, and every person, that said babies "should" sleep any way at all. All the stuff that said they should be sleeping 2-3 hours a day made me feel crazy and like I was doing something wrong. My kids have just never been great nappers: my 16 month old sometimes only naps 45 mins or an hour in a whole day, and my 3 year old doesn't even nap at all anymore unless she's sick. Neither of them sleep more than 10 hours at night. Don't stress about it-- every kid is so different!
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I didn't worry with either of my LO's - just kind of went with what my first did, and if something wasn't working anymore, then I changed it. Sometimes it took me awhile to catch on, which always made me feel a bit guilty when I figured out that something had changed and I wasn't keeping up with it. My first was a short napper, and then gradually she settled into 2 long naps a day. She was always up a lot at night, mostly to nurse, until she was about 14 months, then she started sleeping right through just fine. My second is only 6 weeks, but it a champion sleeper - nice long naps during the day, only wakes once to feed at night. I think sleep has much more to do with personality than anything else, so it makes sense not to stress too much about it!
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I was OBSESSED with sleep for LO's first year. Miraculously, now that she is 19 months, it is not a stress for me anymore at all. She STTN and her bedtime is anytime between 7:30 & 9. She naps every day - sometimes for one hour, sometimes for three. Sometimes her nap is at 11am and sometimes it is at 1pm.
One of the things that really scares me about having another is being able to "let go" the sleep issue. LO was a fussy baby and I was obsessed with getting her to sleep because I felt like it would make her "happy." Granted, she was in a better mood when she was well rested, but looking back I should have just chilled out on it. But, I don't know if I have it in me to really let it go at that infant stage!
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Yeah, I for sure ignored any advice about how my baby 'should' sleep, and man am I glad I did. I really do not understand the stress that people feel about it, honestly. My daughter slept whenever as a baby, and now as a preschooler she sleeps well at night, and naps in the afternoon. And she's very, very flexible, which is what I wanted most of all.
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This is so nice to hear! I agree that I think sleep has a lot to do with personality.
DD was a crappy napper and needed to be bounced a long time to sleep. I stressed out so much about her sleep and lack of naps. After sleep training at 5 months she slept like a champ at night. She's never been a great napper.
Now with DS I'm trying to not stress. He doesn't sleep through the night, but I think he's just a light eater and a cat napper.
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Nope, I never stressed with either LO. DD1 took 30 minute naps every 2 hours until she was about 9 or 10 months old, which was contrary to what everything said she should be doing, but she also slept 12 hours straight through the night from 2.5 months on, so I certainly wasn't going to mess with a good thing!
DD2 was a better napper but still woke once during the night until we finally booted her out of our room at 9 months old. Never worried about it either way - the saying sleep begets sleep was very true for our LOs so I tried to allow them ample opportunity to nap, but beyond that, I didn't stress about it.
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Same. I stressed so much over naps and sleep with dd1 because she wasn't sleeping as much as the books said. She was happy though. With dd2 i don't stress about it at all (except for a few days when i was trying to push her bedtime back) and i break a lot of rules. Patting to sleep, cosleeping, etc. She is happy and so am i.
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I found that when I returned to work and our family found our new natural rhythm that everything flowed much better. Daycare did their thing with naps, then she napped right when I picked her up, then bedtime. It happened really naturally after stressing out about it for 3 months on maternity leave.
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I just let my daughter lead the way. She's always been a pretty good sleeper in my opinion, but I have always had realistic expectations about infant and now toddler sleep.
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I am ready to join this train....I stress about naps @babynumber1: DD goes to a sitter in 7 weeks she will be 7.5 months I stress daily because her naps are awful
But I figure she will have to figure a new routine out regardless of good or bad naps come end of July -
I don't worry. M just sleeps when he sleeps. He doesn't like to live by a schedule.
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Pretty much everything that @daniellemybelle said for us too. I finally started not worrying about her sleep when she was around 16 or 17 months and dropped down to one solid nap (luckily for us, she has been pretty consistent about STTN since 11 months or so).
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Meh, I never stressed much about it. He was a happy kid and never seemed cranky/overtired so I used the 40 min cat nap to my advantage and got out and did a lot of stuff. He napped 40 mins 4x/day for a loooong time. His naps naturally lengthened on their own. He didn't start STTN until he was 12 months old and even then it only lasted 2 months. Now he's almost 2 years old and he sttn and naps 1 1/2-3 hours/day.
I think what made me calm about it is that a friend of mine said she knew someone with 5 kids and 3 of them were crappy sleepers and 2 were really good sleepers. They didn't do anything differently with any of the kids and felt a lot of it was just personality.
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Those reqs are BS, imo, and for very lucky parents (whose babies love sleep- supposedly some do, but my DD was not even a sleepy newborn!) I learned very early on that no general guidelines applied to us.
DD has never slept any recommended amount. These are little people, live humans, reqs are just reqs.
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Sadie went through a cat napping period too! By 8ish months things got way better.
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@FaithFertility: Ds1 never naps at home. Yet at school, he is one of the first to settle down for nap time. I was so worried when he started - for nothing! They can be totally different kids at daycare.
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Not since sleep training at 3.5 months. He's backslid a couple of times because of jetlag and separation anxiety, but now that I have no issues re-training, I try not to stress if he has a couple of bad nights here and there.
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I'm perfectly happy with how LO is sleeping these days, and I find all the advice about getting your baby on a schedule to be overwhelming and somewhat contradictory. We are only at 9 weeks right now, but for the time being I'm still content to follow her cues and leave it at that. If she wakes up, she's up. If she yawns, I put her down - but if she doesn't want to sleep, then we're up again. If she wakes up from a long nap and we change/feed and she falls asleep nursing and naps again, that's fine too. Whatever. She's healthy and happy and DH and I are getting enough sleep at night, so it's all good as far as we're concerned.
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