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Hi Emma,
Thank you so much for your reply!
Here is what we have been doing:
She gets swaddled for every nap and night time sleep, unless we are doing contact naps.
For night time sleep, the pyramid works very well, and we often just need to shush while in her view for a while before being able to walk away and she falls asleep, but that doesn’t work for naps. For naps, we will often soothe her until she is floppy and in deep sleep, then we try to transfer her to the bassinet.
Often this transfer works and she will continue to sleep in the bassinet, however the length of this sleep varies a lot: it is often 5 minutes, and at most 20 minutes. When she wakes up, she wakes up distressed and crying, and won’t resettle by herself or with any of the pyramid methods. She needs to be taken out and will not be soothed back to sleep, she often stops showing tiredness cues for 90-120 minutes after these short bassinet naps.
This would be fine if her wake windows were short and she didn’t get cranky as the day went by, but I can see that she is very tired but “fighting” sleep: she will often start dozing off while feeding in the nursery, so at that point I’d take her to our bedroom which is dark, cool and has white noise playing, and as soon as we enter the room she will open her eyes wide and resist being soothed to sleep (she will just stare at us the entire time with wide eyes, and stop showing sleep cues).
I’ve tried to let her sleep in the nursery by putting a crib mattress on the floor with mixed success. It works about 30% of the time, and nap length is completely unpredictable – the nursery room is much more exposed to outside noise than our bedroom so it often depends on how noisy the street is.
When I say we are trying to soothe her to sleep, here is what we do:
Rock her up and down, side to side, bouncing… sometimes in silence, sometimes singing a lullaby or reading a bedtime story in a quiet and serene voice. I also tried playing calming music. I tried looking at her the whole time, and also ignoring her (looking away from her face).
Sometimes I have to do that for 45 minutes until she finally falls asleep. At that point I tell myself – I will just keep doing whatever I was doing to get her to fall asleep so she can rest up. But even being held (not transferred to bassinet) she will wake up within those 5 to 20 minutes after falling asleep.
There are two methods that get her to sleep quickly: the baby swing and a car ride. However as soon as either of them stops moving, she wakes up so it is not a viable option to get her into her bassinet asleep this way.
The only thing that has been working this week is cuddling in bed: my husband or I will lay her along our belly and wrap our arm around her torso. In the dark, with white noise on. By doing this, she will take longer naps of 60-90 minutes which are more age appropriate for her, and we also notice she doesn’t get as cranky throughout the day when we do that. However I’d rather not do this cuddling in bed, it is very difficult to not fall asleep, which could create an unsafe sleeping environment.
We are out of ideas of what else to try to get her to sleep longer for her naps. And the little amount of sleep during the day is driving us both a little crazy lol.
Thank you in advance 🙂