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Hi Emma
With naps, we don’t really have a schedule as such – we watch for sleepy cues, and follow rough wake windows as a guide. Once we feel she’s tired and ready for a nap we’ll take her up to her room, close the blinds and curtains, put on the white noise, put her sleeping bag on, sing her a song and then put her down and work up and down the settling pyramid depending how easily she is going to sleep. She’s been doing anywhere between 30mins and 90min naps at the minute, and we’re probably getting a maximum of three naps a day and always try to finish the last nap between 4:30pm and 5pm, which is 2.5-3hours before her bedtime of 7:30pm.
For bedtime we feed her a bottle at 6:45pm whilst I run her bath, she has a bath, is dressed for bed then I try feeding her the rest of the bottle or breastfeed in our room with the lights on. Then we turn the lights off, put white noise on, put her sleeping bag on, sing her a song and then put her down working up and down the pyramid again. She is pretty consistently asleep between 7:30-8pm every night.
My partner has stopped offering contact naps unless he absolutely can’t get her down for a nap in her room.
Nights are a bit unpredictable, but essentially we’ll get her to sleep by 8pm at the latest, and usually she’s awake by 90mins-2hours after that and then that continues throughout the night pretty much. I’ve been feeding her back to sleep each time after we’d stopped feeding her to sleep at bedtime, you’d suggested with this and the settling pyramid she might naturally stop this. But to be honest, it is the quickest way to get her back to sleep so I’ve been doing it to get her back down. Sometimes she won’t go back to sleep for an hour to two hours, this is usually in the early hours of the morning near 3am. But not always.
It’s all a bit of a mixed bag as she did a nearly 6 hour stretch two nights ago, but last night was pretty much wakes every two hours!
Not sure that’s much help, but let me know if you do have any suggestions.
Thanks
Maddie