I guess one other thing we could use your advice on is that several nights this week, she’s gotten up within 3-4 hours of bedtime for a feed. One night she went 7 hours after bedtime before needing to feed, so she is definitely capable of doing longer. Is this something we can influence or improve so it’s more consistently a longer stretch of…

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Hi Emma,

That all makes sense! Thank you!

As you said, it seems like our daughter’s sleep patterns are maturing. In the last week, her morning wake up has shifted earlier to 6am, with a bedtime of somewhere between 7 and 8pm.

We find that it can be difficult to keep up with this schedule as we’re having to extend most naps or do contact naps (4…

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Hi Emma,

We’ll give that a try. She actually seemed very tired at the 1 hour 10 minute mark today so I ended up putting her down for a nap then. I’m not sure if that’s because she woke up for 5:45 feed and then only slept a little bit before waking up at 7. It took about 10 minutes to get her down.

Is this wake window something that can be…

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Hi Emma,

That all makes sense. We’re trying your advice to leave her for a little bit to see if she’ll fall back asleep.

Our issues with sleep continue, however. In the past week or so, we’ve been having an increasingly hard time settling our 15-week-old for her first nap of the day. She’s been waking up recently around 6:40am, and we’ve been…

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Yes that makes sense!

We have another question for you. Our daughter usually wakes up for a feed between 5 and 6 am. We used to be able to put her back to sleep in bed bassinet after this feed and she’d wake up between. 7 and 7:30. Lately, though, it’s become hard to get her to go back to sleep. She’ll fall asleep during the feeding but then…

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Hi Emma,

That also sounds very reasonable and doable (even if hard at the start)! Thanks for the insight on the order of the bedtime routine, also. We’ll make that change!

I guess another question we had is whether it’s better to do 5 short naps in a day or to rescue 1 or 2 naps so that they are longer. We find that we can rescue naps with…

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I just wanted to add some observations we’ve made. I’ll note that these observations were made over the past 2 weeks when it has been taking a long time for her to fall asleep when we try to put her down for bedtime, but I think they’ve been pretty consistent.

– If I feed her between 5-6pm (at the start of the last wake window), and we start…

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Thanks for your response! No worries at all on the questions – we are happy to answer them! Here are our replies:

1. Yes, her wake time has been pretty consistently between 7:00am and 7:30am. She’s had one or two days when she woke up around 6:15am, but those have been rare.

2. Yes, we follow wake-feed-play-sleep.

3. We don’t use a pacifier.

4.…

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Hi Emma,

We’ve been having trouble with our 13 week old’s bedtime for the past 1-2 weeks. She’s currently taking 5 naps and her wake windows are 75/75/90/90/90/90 minutes. We’ve been wanting to switch to 4 naps but her naps are typically only between 30-50 minutes long, so we almost always have to add in a 5th nap to have a reasonable bedtime. If…

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Hi Emma,

Thanks again for all the suggestions! We’re working on slowly implementing them. We’ve moved our wake-up time to between 6:30-7am and we’re trying to get her down for bedtime between 6:30-7pm, both of which seem to be positive changes and more in line with her circadian rhythm.

We had a question related to bedtime, but regarding her nap…

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Hi Emma,

Thanks so much for the advice! All of the suggestions certainly sound doable and we’ll give them a try. We do have a few more questions for you.

We will try to wake her up within a 30-minute window in the mornings. What should we do if she wakes up earlier than this window?

If we can follow your 6 steps and get her to fall asleep with a…

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Hi Emma,

Thanks for getting back to me! Here are some responses to your questions. I’m happy to provide more details or clarification where needed.

Does she have a consistent wake-up time? If so, what is it?

She generally wakes up between 6:30am and 7:30am every morning. (It was typically closer to 7:30am but maybe has shifted a bit…

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Hi Emma,

Our now 8-week old (breastfed) baby has been napping and sleeping in her bassinet since she was born. However, for the past few days, she has stopped wanting to nap in her bassinet. We will put her down in the bassinet asleep, as we have always done, and within 3-5 minutes, she’ll wake up and start fussing. Even if we pick her back up…

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Hi Emma!

Thanks so much – that was very helpful!

Aditi

Hi Emma,

Thank you so much for putting together this video course! My husband and I have a question for you regarding how to implement the “eat, play, sleep” schedule for our exclusively breastfed newborn, who is currently about 3.5 weeks old.

Our pediatrician and lactation consultant have recommended that I feed our daughter from both breasts…

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