[Aditi Shukla]

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 time she sleeps after bedtime or will it continue to be a little erratic right now?

[Aditi Shukla]

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 naps total right now) to make it to bedtime since her natural bassinet naps are relatively short right now (30-50 minutes).

Do you have any advice for us? Should we just keep doing what we’re doing and working on independent sleep until she can naturally connect sleep cycles herself? Should we shift her morning rise time a little bit later? If so, how? Should we extend wake windows? Our concern about extending naps is that she might end up getting too much daytime sleep and not have enough sleep pressure at night.

Happy to hear any advice you might have!

Thanks,

Aditi

[Aditi Shukla]

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 changed on a day-to-day basis depending on her mood? In fact, can wake windows generally change a bit day-to-day depending on how tired the baby seems?

Thanks,

Aditi

[Aditi Shukla]

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 wake up when we move her to the bassinet. Do you have any suggestions? Ideally it’d be nice to lose this feed because it’s so close to her morning rise time.

Thanks,

Aditi

[Aditi Shukla]

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 contact naps and she will nap a lot longer. Our concern about 5 short naps is that it adds an extra wake window and we weren’t sure if that was making our daughter more tired. I think these concerns will obviously be addressed once we can teach her to sleep independently and she can connect sleep cycles to take longer naps by herself, but we were just wondering what to do for now.

Thanks,

Aditi

[Aditi Shukla]

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 trying to put her to sleep between 7 and 7:30, she’ll usually wake up to do a feed between 8:30 and 9pm.

– If I feed her between 6-7pm (at the start of the last wake window), and we start trying to put her to sleep between 7:30 and 8:15pm, she’ll usually sleep between 4-6 hours before needing a feeding.

[Aditi Shukla]

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. For naps, when I think she looks tired and it’s seems like it’s an appropriate length wake window, I usually take her to our bedroom, draw the curtains (if they’re open), turn on the sound machine, put her in her sleep sack, and then bounce lightly while singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” three times.

5. For her bedtime, we typically do a diaper change and remove her day clothes, massage with lotion, offer a short top-off feed, put on PJs, read one or two books, say goodnight, dim the lights, turn on the sound machine, put her in her sleep sack, and then bounce lightly while singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” three times.

6. We have been rocking/bouncing her to sleep for all naps, usually standing still, though we sometimes escalate to walking while doing this if she is being particularly fussy.

7. She sleeps in a bassinet in our bedroom. We keep the thermostat at 68 F, but the temperature fluctuates between 67 F and 70 F over the course of the day. We have blackout curtains that keep most light out, but there is some light that filters in from the edges of the curtains during the day. We use a sound machine to try to mask noise from the street outside and keep the door closed to sounds from the rest of the apartment.

8. She’s been napping mostly in the same bassinet in our room that she uses for night sleep. We’ve tried moving her to her crib in a separate room with similar environment (maybe the slightest bit darker), but haven’t noticed a big difference between the two environments. We have noticed that we have had to rescue more naps “false start” naps with contact naps recently.

9. Her overnight sleep is good overall, we think, but it has been a bit variable lately on account of this uncertainty around bedtime. She usually wakes for 1-2 feeds a night. On a good night, she might sleep 5+ h until the first feed, and then all the way to her 7am wake time. On a bad night, she wakes within 3-4 h after bedtime and wakes again for a second feed. The earlier night feeds recently have felt like another clue that something is off with our bedtime schedule.

10. We are beginning to take more steps toward establishing independent sleep, and have been trying out the settling pyramid again recently, but aren’t far along in that process yet. We’re hoping to work on this more methodically over the next week or 2. We figured we’d start with bedtime first and then work on naps, but are happy to hear your advice on this. She has recently discovered her hands and loves to suck on them, so we’re hoping maybe she’ll also be able to self-soothe to sleep if we put her down drowsy.

Another question we have for you is whether you have advice about total hours of day sleep we should be aiming for for a 13 (almost 14)-week old and thoughts on whether 4 or 5 naps is more appropriate for her age–or whether it really just depends on how naps are going that day.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply!

[Aditi Shukla]

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 schedule. It’s typically quite difficult to get our daughter down for her last nap. Our goal is to wake her up from this nap somewhere around 5:30pm. We’re able to put her down for her last nap but she usually wakes up within minutes. Sometimes she cries, but often she just lays in her crib with her eyes open, looking content. In the past, we’ve been able to get her to take this nap if we let her take a contact nap.

To give you an idea of her nap schedule, this is what it approximately looked like yesterday:

Nap 1: 8:10am for 1 hour, 40 minutes

Nap 2: 11:00am for 1 hour

Nap 3: 1:00pm for 40 minutes

Nap 4: 3:00pm for 40 minutes

Nap 5: 5:00pm on and off awake and fussy

Then we started her bath around 5:45, with the goal of ending our bedtime routine around 6:30. However, she was very fussy after the bath and seemed very tired—it seemed to us this was because she slept very little in her last nap.

We have a few questions. We’re wondering whether there’s something off about her nap schedule, like whether we need to drop this nap or change something about our strategy for getting her down. Or should we try to get her to do this nap by letting her contact nap? If she wakes up and just lays in her crib with her eyes open, should we just let her be or should we try to put her down again?

Thanks again,

Aditi

[Aditi Shukla]

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 gradual reduction in movement, what would be the next step? Would it be to put her in her bassinet drowsy and try to get her to fall asleep in the bassinet itself?

Also, we had a related question regarding her bedtime. We’re still trying to figure out the correct bedtime for her. Since she doesn’t have many wake windows yet, we’re still waking her up from a nap or waiting for her to get up from a nap to do our bedtime routine. We find that if she wakes up around 6:30pm or 7pm from her last nap and we do our bedtime routine, she can stay awake for it, but gets fussy towards when we get to the last step, which is reading a book. With this earlier bedtime, she wakes up twice during the night. We’ve tried waking her up at 8pm to do our bedtime routine, but we find she is very sleepy and cranky if you wake her up at this time and is fussy for most of the bedtime routine. However, she only wakes up once during the night when we do this later bedtime. With both of these bedtimes, she sleeps the longest stretch of the night after them. How do we establish what the best bedtime is for her? Is her crankiness implying that we have her time wrong?

Thanks again,

Aditi

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by  Aditi Shukla.

[Aditi Shukla]

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 earlier recently—we’ve noticed she sometimes is lying awake making some quiet noises when we wake up around 6:45am.)

Have you been able to start the wake, feed, play, sleep routine during the day?

She typically has a longer wake window in the morning, and there, we had been sticking pretty well to a wake, feed, play, sleep routine. She didn’t necessarily always sleep well or for long during the nap after this wake period. We try to do this whenever she seems awake after other feedings during the day, but honestly, she doesn’t seem to have more than two of these extended wake periods during the day. Since her worse napping started, she’s been less engaged in play in the morning too, which we attribute to her playing catchup on her sleep.

How are you settling her to sleep for naps and bedtime?

We mostly have been rocking or bouncing her to sleep for naps, and still placing her in the bassinet while fully asleep. Sometimes, we’ve been able to use the settling pyramid to shush her to sleep if she wakes, but less so recently.

Have you implemented a nap routine? If so, what does it look like?

For her naps, we usually take her to the bedroom, swaddle her and bounce or rock her until she falls asleep and then put her down in her bassinet.

Have you implemented a bedtime routine? If so, what does it look like?

We usually start our bedtime routine around 7pm. It usually entails waking her up, feeding her, changing her diaper, doing a quick massage with lotion and reading her a book. We did notice that she gets very tired by the end of the bedtime routine and often starts crying at the end of the routine. We were wondering if this means that her bedtime is slightly too late.

Where does she sleep during the day? (e.g., Is the bassinet in a cool, dark, and quiet room?)

Her bassinet is in our bedroom. The room is generally at 67 or 68 degrees Fahrenheit. We have blackout curtains, but there is some light that sneaks through the tops and the sides of the curtains. We use a white noise machine, but there is probably some amount of noise that gets in from us walking around or doing things around the apartment.

How many naps is she having during the day?

She generally has 5 naps during the day. We try to feed her every 2-3 hours. She is generally harder to put down for naps in the evening.

How long is she generally staying awake between naps?

She is generally awake about 15-20 minutes to feed and about 10 minutes to do a diaper change for all of her naps. We usually change her diaper between sides. Sometimes we’re able to sneak in 3-5 minutes of tummy time. In the morning, she stays up closer to 1.5 hours, but does not have many other very long wake windows during the day. Occasionally we get another long one in the evening.

What time is her bedtime?

We usually start our bedtime routine (feeding, diaper change, lotion massage, book) around 7pm and get her down in her bassinet by 7:45 or 8pm.

Does she use a pacifier?

We haven’t started using a pacifier yet.

Do you swaddle her?

We do swaddle her for both naps and bedtime.

Is she waking overnight for a feed? If so, can you give me a rough idea of the times she wakes?

She wakes up twice every night for feeds, roughly sometime between 11pm and 1am and then again between 4am and 5:30am.

When you say she is refusing to nap in the bassinet, is this happening for all naps or mainly towards the end of the day?

This seems to be happening for all naps for the past few days. Often we’ll put her down asleep and then 10-15 minutes later, find her lying in the bassinet with her eyes open, but not crying. We’re not sure what to do when this happens. Other times she’ll wake up as soon as we put her down. And yet other times, she’ll wake up after 20 minutes and either cry or make a lot of noises.

[Aditi Shukla]

Hi Emma!

Thanks so much – that was very helpful!

Aditi

[Aditi Shukla]

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 using a ~1h 20min or ~1h 30 min first wake window.

As I mentioned above, we are still using a combination of bouncing, rocking, and shushing to soothe her to sleep for naps, and this generally works well for other naps throughout the day. However, it has been taking sometimes upwards of 20-30 minutes with bouncing and rocking for her to fall asleep for this first nap, and today after 30 or 40 minutes, she still failed to fall and stay asleep, so I just gave up and will try to lengthen her second nap.

We feel like something is off with her first wake window, but we don’t have a good read on whether it is too long or too short. She doesn’t always show obvious sleepy cues in the morning. She does generally seem energetic and happy in the morning, even around the time that her wake window is ending. Our longest wake windows (at the end of the day) are only 1h 45min, so we feel like it would be unusual for her to need such a long wake window for the first nap, but is that possible? Do you have any thoughts on what we might do to help her get to sleep more quickly and reliably for the first nap?

Thank you,
Aditi