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Following. I cannot get my baby to nap for more than 30 mins. When did you start nap training? My baby is 7 weeks. I just try to put her down when she looks tired but I'm not good at reading her cues.

Commenting so I can follow along. My kids have been napping well recently but one's in the swing, ones in the RNP. I really want to get them to nap in their cribs but they won't have it. Oh and half the time we only get 35-45 min naps. I'm wondering if we figure out napping, overnight might be better too? Things overnight are crazy again!!

@Pumpkin Pie: 30 mins is pretty typical nap length for that age. They will get longer as she gets older!

Please tell me it'll get better soon. Please!!

Excuse my ignorance but what is 2-3-4?

@Mae I can only hope we can do nap training by 8 weeks. Sleep is just all over the place for us. My husband and I ate dinner tonigt with a night light on because our baby had just fallen asleep in her swing in the living room.

1) Yes. Modified bedtime routine that basically involves sleep sack, one or two books (always the same books), turn on white noise, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, then a kiss and "it's nap time. Night night."
2) He's only refused a few naps, luckily, but for those I have let him CIO for up to 1 hr. It didn't work and I always regretted it. I would try again at his next supposed nap time. (Most of the time the refusal was for the last nap of the day, and I would just get him and put him in a carrier and let him nap that way rather than let him cry for the full hour).
3) At almost 6 months, his naps are getting more predictable but I can't say we're on a true schedule yet. Naps depend on his wakeup time, which still varies by 30-60 min. I just follow his lead.
4) I was so scared about nap training. Read my previous posts. Lol. It turns out that once I night trained him, his naps really just fell into place. I went from having to hold him for every.single.nap (like you, I literally had zero down time) to having him nap in his crib but only for 30-45min, to now- he now goes down easily and sleeps well. He did have a couple of times where he refused to nap and so I guess the method of training I used was extinction CIO but like I said above, it didn't work and I regretted it. I think I needed to wait until he naturally did it on his own. Which is what so many bees told me but I was so eager to get his naps down asap!!! I hate naps!!

@Pumpkin Pie: At 7 weeks, there's pretty much no schedule.....and a lot of people think nights should get sorted out before naps are addressed. For us, I definitely think night training helped sort out the naps. I was MISERABLE from week 8-18 or so, when he decided he wasn't going to nap anymore unless it was on me. Hang in there. It gets better (I can't believe I'm saying this, because people were saying this to me and I never believed it either). When my LO was 7 weeks, my husband and I had to take turns eating dinner so one of us could hold him. Or, I would have to eat while having him in a carrier- and I have dropped food (luckily not hot) on his head more than once.

Same routine as night, minus the bath.

We had to nap and night train at the same time.

@Mae: ugh! Naps suck. I remember now that my lo stopped napping well on me. When I used to hold him, I could get good naps from him but then they started getting shorter and shorter... Luckily that was right around when we night trained so I figured I'd try setting him in his crib for naps (previously he refused to nap there). So as long as she's still napping well on you, maybe just accept it and wait for her to outgrow it?! It can't last forever, right? Watching shows and reading on my tablet helped....

1) Did you institute some sort of routine before naps to signal your LO it was nap time? Not really. basically carry her upstairs, turn off the lights, turn on the sound machine, lie her in the crib, tell her I love her and I will see her after her nap, and leave.

2) During nap training, if LO refused to nap, did you wait until the next "nap time" or did you just let them get up after X(how many?) minutes then try again the next time they looked tired? Initially we tried gradual CIO, where I'd go in after 5 minutes, then 10, then 15, etc. Didn't work for her because each time she saw me she'd get more worked up. So then if she started crying (really crying, not just fussing) I would give her 15 minutes. After an hour if she was still crying (with me checking on her every 15 minutes to calm her) I would get her up. I only had to do that once or twice.

3) If you did try to get them on a schedule, how did you choose it? Was it similar to what they'd done before (if they had a schedule) or did you pick a new schedule that worked better for your life? I started putting her down for a morning nap about 3 hours after she woke up and then 3 hours after waking from her previous nap. This seemed to "kick-start" her bodily clock and now she is usually tired enough to nap after 2 hours of waking in the morning and 3 hours of waking in the afternoon. Sometimes she takes a third cat-nap around 4 or 5.

4) The biggy: What method did you use to nap train? Did it work? How long did it take? See #2 for details. It took about a week for her to catch on to this whole napping thing. I chose a week when I knew we would be home every day so that errands would not interrupt us. My initial attempt to do gradual CIO did not work, but when I adjusted my method it worked pretty quickly.

Side note: sometimes she will awaken during her nap (around 30 - 45 minutes) and fuss a little bit. I do not go in to get her unless it is a full cry that goes on for more than 10 minutes. She is still learning to string together her sleep cycles, and sometimes will wake fussy but then go back to sleep for another hour or so.