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Hi Emma,
It has taken me a while to reply because it has been a bit of a roller coaster ride between a string of day care illnesses and what I think might be her 4 month sleep regression as she is now 16 weeks old.
Since my last message, she started napping better at day care and isn’t a complete puddle anymore when I take her home at the end of the day, so that’s a piece of good news. She continued to have some false starts and/or waking after the first sleep cycle with an ~8:30pm bedtime. I thought maybe she started her 4 month sleep regression because there was one night she woke up basically every 45 minutes and except for once or twice was able to put herself back to sleep. But more recently we’ve taken a huge step backwards as she had a couple rough nights where she just couldn’t settle in her crib at bedtime no matter what we did and just screamed at the top of her lungs until we picked her up. we couldn’t get her back sleeping in the crib until 1am. I even tried feeding her to sleep at midnight which didn’t work (normally I don’t nurse her overnight until 4-5am). These rough nights happened regardless of whether we kept the last cat nap around 6-6:30pm 2 hours before bedtime as we were doing before or dropped the last nap altogether, in which case her last wake window ended up being ~3 hours. She still puts herself to sleep in the crib for most of her naps so I know she CAN self-soothe, but for whatever reason she has been getting so worked up at night I’m not sure what to do. She falls asleep the minute we pick her up so I know it’s not just some physical discomfort we’re missing. The first time I know it was because we all had a nasty stomach bug and my mother-in-law ended up holding her all night, but she was able to sleep in the crib the rest of that week, so I don’t know if just that one time would have ruined all of the sleep habits we have been working hard to build?
We have already stopped extending her naps and let her take short naps all day just like she does at day care (totaling 2.5 hours per day) to minimize that sleep association with being held.
Joyce