[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

Sorry I didn’t answer for a bit, wanted to gather some data 🙂 Then quite a few things happened…

First of all, I’ve been trying the new routine you suggested for a few days with moderate success. Things looked really hopeful. But then she caught on to being picked up in order to be rocked to sleep, and she started clutching at my arm and turning her head awkwardly, so it became a struggle. Then next day after that i hurt my back and I’m still recovering (tried rocking her to sleep just now in a different position, she was tolerating it, but my back wasn’t), so we’re back to square one for now.

She also figured out how to roll to her side and tries doing it all the time, which coincided with her starting to struggle in the tiger in a tree position, but only on one of the sides, so I’m wondering if she’s maybe hurt her neck (we have a doctor’s appointment in a few days anyway). So I need to recover and see what’s happening with her, and then we’ll hopefully get back on track.

And I’ve been tracking her sleep, and that also started changing. Firstly, I was wrong about her usually having 5 naps. 4 naps are actually more typical now, but she’s starting to transition to 3, I think, a couple of times now she’s had a long evening nap that either finished at 6pm or we had to wake her. So it was more like 40-40-120 today, for example, with night sleep from 20:50 until 08:15. She’s 3 months old now, so I guess 3 naps are ok if one of them is long?

I’m tracking mostly to figure out which morning wake time works best for her, but I’m also not seeing the first nap happen at the same time on days when she wakes up more or less at the same time. They’re all over the place, sometimes her first wake window is really short.

And regarding getting her to wake within 30 minutes… It’s really hard to wake her in the morning if she’s overslept. She just doesn’t react, really, until she’s ready. We’ve tried opening the blinds, being noisy, talking to her, touching her… Is there a trick to this? I mean if we want to bring her out of sleep gently. And what to do if the opposite happens and she wakes up too early one day?

Sorry for all the questions 🙂 Your suggestions have been really helpful (until my back gave out :D), but there’s always something new…

Best regards,

Kate

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

Just wanted to give you a final update that you were absolutely right about moving her morning wake up time to earlier. This completely solved the issue with her night sleep. And even though we now have to wake up much earlier, it’s better than having a crappy night and waking up later.

If she wakes up at ~6:30, we have enough time to fit in that fourth nap until her 20:00-20:30 bedtime, and now we’re back in the world of 6-hour night stretches followed by just 1 or 2 shorter ones! Possibly even longer than 6 hours, but I’m still not sure about letting her go more than that without a feed (we’ll see what the doctor says). No more waking up after the first sleep cycle either since she’s not going to sleep too early anymore.

Also I’ve accidentally stumbled on a nap routine that seems to work 10/10 and doesn’t involve the bottle at all, so things are pretty great again and she closes her eyes so readily (provided I also time the nap just right), it’s incredibly cute. Apparently she likes Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen way more than the song I’ve been using all her life.

This leaves me wondering, though, if we’re already past the 4-month sleep regression or has it not even started yet and we were just suffering from the wrong balance of night/day sleep? How can you even tell? She’s 5 months next week, so surely it would’ve started by now?

BR

Kate

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

Thank you for your words 🙂 I was actually surprised to find out how often this sort of thing happens when I was frantically googling what symptoms to watch for that morning… One more advantage of breastfeeding, I suppose 🙁 Anyway… These couple of weeks made me realize how much we took for granted her stable night sleep and ability to sleep in her crib. So many parents out there have it so much harder for so much longer. And last night she again did 5h straight, so I’m feeling much better (another accidental 4th nap to the rescue).

Regarding her nap schedule, a 3-nap day looks like this:

First wake window is ~1h30m (any bigger than that and she cries before falling asleep, but the app typically suggests around 2h)

The first nap is typically between 40 and 50 minutes. Very rarely shorter than that, but still more than 30 (today though she was waking up all the time and ended up finishing the nap in my arms, barely making it to 30 minutes)

Second wake window is between 2h and 2h20m

Second nap is also 40-50 minutes, usually closer to 50.

Third wake window is around 2h30m.

Third nap is often shorter than I’d like, typically in the 30-40 minute range, though it does sometimes go on until 50-55 minutes.

Then it’s ideally 3h of the last wake window (though it rarely works out like that if she woke up too early). 3h exactly seems to be the sweet spot, any less than that and I’m having trouble settling her, any more – and she’s overtired and miserable.

If bedtime happens early, she also can’t seem to go back to sleep on her own after the first sleep cycle (actually, after about 1 hour, not 40 minutes). It kinda feels like the fourth nap that sticks to bedtime with no time in-between, you know? Like the 19:30 is the nap and only after that the actual bedtime starts at 20:30.

That accidental fourth nap can happen in any form – it can be a short 20-minute stroller nap in the morning before her first planned nap (then the whole schedule moves and I can fit in 4 naps with a later bedtime), it can be the same situation, but in the last wake window (sadly couldn’t reproduce it again, would’ve been ideal, but she just doesn’t fall asleep in the stroller when I want her to)… and most recently it can be in the form of a double nap (when she wakes up from a normal-length second nap still sleepy and doesn’t want to do anything and when I realize that I take her back to the bedroom and she sleeps another full cycle). But as I said, I can’t force any of those naps (like today, when she had terrible two first naps and I was hoping to get her to sleep for longer).

So I’m pretty sure she doesn’t get enough day sleep, as you said, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do aside from waiting for things to resolve on their own as she gets a little older. We’re just in that unpleasant place in-between where, if she could tolerate maybe a total of additional hour of wake time or had a total of one hour added to her naps or night sleep, we’d be fine.

As for getting her off the feed-to-sleep association, when she’s overtired or otherwise upset, she still defaults to it most times. But I think this is completely fine at this age.

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

Sorry I haven’t answered for a while, I am so sleep deprived one night I’ve actually accidentally gave my baby water without the formula (she’s fine, since she never ate much at night, so that was a small amount, but this was a new low for me).

Since the last time I’ve made a couple of improvements and I’d even go so far as to call removing feed-to-sleep association a success (for a given value of success, but I’ll take it). Nights still suck, but more on that below.

The first thing I did is switched to the Napper app which predicts the nap schedule based on your previous data instead of just recording it (as my previous app did). This allowed me to free a bit of head space from always calculating when the next nap should happen. I do still watch for her sleepy cues, but so far it’s been pretty good at its predictions, judging by how fast she tends to fall asleep now.

The other thing is we’ve arrived at a compromise that allows me to keep my back from breaking and to let her fall asleep faster. I’ve noticed a while ago that she seems to always want a specific thing to help her fall asleep, and once she gets it she readily closes hew eyes and is asleep immediately. But that thing varied from nap to nap. One time it could be rocking in tiger in a tree position on her left side, another time she’d hate it and want the right side. Or she might want the side lying position facing me. Or she’d hate any kind of rocking and just want the bottle. And so on. But slowly things seem to have settle on feeding her a little before sleep (the full feed happens around the middle of her wake window and this one is small) then holding her in a cradle hold while sitting on the bed rocking very gently and singing a lullaby. Sometimes I still have to stand up and walk around, sometimes she’ll still want the bottle if she wakes up during transfer. But I see it as a very positive sign that we have moved on from more intensive walking/rocking and feeding to sleep most times.

Putting her into the crib awake definitely doesn’t work at the moment, but I think this way we may arrive at it sometime later, when she’s ready to move on from falling asleep in my arms. So for the moment I’m happy with this (and my back is feeling so much better).

The nights are a different matter… I would say we are now consistently on a 3-nap schedule, but her morning wake time has de-stabilized and increasingly more often she wakes up just past 6am, which is incredibly early for us and we can’t keep it up. She also wakes up A LOT during the night. 6-8 times. She’s never done that before, always was a great sleeper. She goes to sleep at 19:30, then she’ll still often wake up after one sleep cycle and I’ll have to go in and cradle her again. Then it’s at most 3 hours of sleep, more often 2, sometimes even just 1. Sometimes she’ll sleep until 7:30 (which is much more sustainable for us), sometimes she’s up at 6:10 (with the room still dark).

And my records seem to indicate that the only two times she’s recently slept with 2-3 night wakings was following the day the 4th nap accidentally did happen (when she accidentally fell asleep in the stroller way too early and her whole schedule for the day shifted). She went to sleep later on those days and was not sleepy enough to settle, but she ended up sleeping so much better. Does this make sense? Or do you think it’s a coincidence? I’m hoping this resolves soon as her ability to stay awake longer naturally progresses as I really need some sleep and I can’t force that 4th nap (tried taking her out for a walk on purpose – nope, didn’t fall asleep. Only when I don’t need it).

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

I’ve just about given up on the fourth nap, so your proposal sounds great. But I don’t really understand what you mean by gently stretching the wake times. Do you mean we ignore the tired cues for some time in order to stretch it? Won’t that make her overtired and more difficult to settle? Do we extend the wake windows little by little each day and just deal with the long evening wake window for now? For example today she again had 3 naps, the wake windows weren’t quite as long as you suggested, but already close, and the last nap ended at 15:34, which is almost there at the earliest wake time you suggested. She went down readily enough for each nap (except for the usual false starts), so I assume she was the right amount of tired, which is making me hopeful this works. But then she was quite miserable for the second half of the last wake window and ended up falling asleep at 18:30 while I was feeding her (before the rest of the nighttime routine). That nap lasted maybe for 3 minutes and she got second wind after that. Couldn’t get her to sleep until 19:30, she just wanted to chat with me and roll-roll-roll.

And for the timings, by start of the nap you mean that’s when she’s already asleep, right, so I should start putting her to bed maybe 20 minutes before that? And by bedtime do you mean that’s when to start the routine, or again she should already be asleep at that time?

Regarding the earlier bedtime, I have a few reservations. Mainly the fact that most times she ends up waking up after 40 minutes and has to be resettled. The rest has to do with our working schedule that means there’s not enough time left for a stroll or a bath 🙁 And I’m worried it will cause her to start waking up earlier in the morning (it hasn’t yet, but she’s kinda restless that last hour before waking) which again doesn’t work between my pumping and my husband’s schedule. But I don’t see another way at least while she’s transitioning, so we’ve been doing it whenever she skips that last nap.

As for the pacifier, I’m not really surprised – anything and everything ends up in her mouth at this age. I don’t think she sees it as a soothing thing, more like another curious thing to explore, so it doesn’t work while she’s awake, only when she’s already quite out of it and I can trick her, then I guess she’s like “oh the bottle’s empty, oh well, time to sleep”, spits it out and goes to sleep.

I really wish I could do option 1. My back is killing me with all this carrying and rocking a 7kg baby (and she’s lanky, basically she has the height of an average 5-6 month old and head control of a 4 month old, so positions are also getting kinda uncomfortable for us both sometimes). But I find she’s just not staying calm in the crib (well, unless there’s a bottle and she’s tired). She’s entertaining herself (doesn’t need light, can make sounds, roll, grab her feet, touch the sides of the crib… the list is endless) or she’s whining and eventually crying. I’ve tried going out of the room while she’s calm (it worked once when she was about 1.5 months old, I went out to wash the pacifier she spit out and came back to find her asleep, but never since). Literally nothing but the bottle or picking her up work. Patting and shushing only works in case I was transferring her asleep and aaaalmost succeeded or if im feeding her in parallel. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong, but she just doesn’t take to it. She just ignores me and keeps dancing.

And about the rolling – yeah, definitely, at the end of a nap she’ll sometimes start rolling, get stuck and cry. Can’t roll back yet – completely uninterested in learning. She’s like an angry tumbler doll that rolls back to her tummy immediately after you try to roll her to her back, all the while screaming bloody murder. Even if she’s obviously sore from all that tummy time and can’t hold her head or push up on her elbows anymore. And I don’t think she has any idea how to sleep (or even just relax) on her tummy, except for a contact nap on me. That’s actually one reason long wake windows are so tough for us, eventually you run out of things to do to make her get some rest from tummy time (it’s either feed, bouncer or carry her around… or a stroll, I guess, but we’re just about to be hit by another heat wave, so I can’t take her out for every wake window, just early morning and evening). I just hope she’ll get stronger soon with all that training she does, and we’ll be able to breathe easier for a while (though she’s already kinda crawling… or rather sliding on her back by pushing off the floor with her feet, can’t even use the changing table anymore, so I don’t think there’s much hope for us that things get easier 😀

I also can’t figure out why some nights are better (not the 6 hour stretch, that seems to be a thing of the past, but we might get two 4 hour stretches in one night) while others are exhausting. The diagrams of sleep times for those days look more or less the same to me.

Anyway, that’s the situation… if you could clarify those questions about the new schedule for me, I’ll get on that and thanks 🙂

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

I can’t say anything’s changed when the trouble started. The baby (almost 4 months old now) is happy and healthy and doing insane amounts of tummy time (you put her on any surface – she’ll immediately roll 99% of the time, yet she’s still completely uninterested in rolling back even if she’s so tired she’s struggling to lift her neck). More fussy than usual, for sure, but she has no symptoms of an illness. Mostly she cries when she’s done too much tummy time and is tired and we try to flip her, but she gets really upset by that. And when she’s overtired.

Regarding the wake windows, I’ve tried longer ones earlier and she seemed overtired and it was getting more difficult to settle her (plus I couldn’t quite figure out the final nap, it was always too close to bed time, but dropping it would make the last wake windows insanely long).

A couple of things got added to our routine, but just since last weekend, after we’ve already been struggling with sleep. First of all, we finally can take her outside again after switching from the reviled bassinet to a reclined stroller sit which she seems so much more content in (and even slept in it for ~25 minutes when it was time for her nap and we were still outside). The second thing is I’ve re-introduced a pacifier (a different brand we haven’t tried before, though to me the shape looks quite the same) for a very specific case: when I give up and give her the bottle, she’ll typically keep it in her mouth for a long time, sometimes even for the whole nap. Now what I do is i take away the bottle when I think she’s asleep and if (or more typically “when”) she wakes up and starts frantically looking for it, I give her the pacifier instead. So far it worked most times in a way that she’ll suck on it a few times, spit it out and fall asleep again. I also do a contact nap if one or two previous naps were cut short, in this case she’ll still have about 40 minutes of undisturbed sleep.

I don’t think I can give you a typical schedule since it’s been thrown into complete disarray by the failed naps and resulting over tiredness so let me walk you through today, it’s a more chill day than what we’ve had recently and closer to our usual schedule.

To start putting her to bed i use the combination of expected length of the wake window for her age and her tired cues, so I think we always have slightly different times, but normally within reason. And she definitely does rely on me to fall asleep since we’re still doing the option 2 of the ones you suggested. Putting her into the crib awake only results in her getting more and more agitated so far.

Yesterday she went to sleep at 19:20 as a result of us trying and failing to get her to sleep for the fourth nap (and the third one ended at 16:34)

She woke up after one sleep cycle as she always does if put to bed this early, had a snack and went back to sleep at 20:14.

The night was pretty bad, the longest stretch she did was 3h42m and every time she woke up (6 times) she wanted the bottle.

She woke up at 07:49 in the morning. I’m still keeping the morning wake times consistent (it’s almost always within 07:30-08:00).

First nap happened at 09:25-10:09, after 1h35m awake. I find the first wake window is always the shortest for her. She went to sleep readily enough after some rocking and singing, but woke up a few minutes after I transferred her (as I said, lately false starts happen regardless of how easily she settled). I tried patting and shushing to no effect, then picked her up and sat on the bed rocking her, she fell asleep and I put her back in.

Second nap: 12:05-12:45, after 1h55m wake window. Basically cried herself to sleep in my arms. Then again woke up a few minutes after transferring, same solution as before.

The third wake window ended up being 2h15m and the nap happened at 15:00- 15:41. Again she was definitely showing tired cues when we started (yawning, rubbing eyes), but was protesting the dark room and would only stop crying when taken out, so it took really long to settle her. Eventually I rocked her to sleep and she was sort of monotonously moaning in my arms by the end (she tends to do that lately when very tired), successfully transferred… and again woke up. Gave her a bottle this time, briefly.

I also want to mention how she wakes up from naps. Usually she starts crying in this sort of creaky way, sometimes she’s banging her feet on the mattress (trying to go back to sleep?). So this time i wait and her crying only intensified so I started shushing, then patting (still think it only makes her more alert), then picked her up and bounced on the bed. All this time she was crying more and more. By the time my husband came in, I was standing by the crib rocking her in the side lying position and she was really miserable. Once he spoke to her and I opened the blinds (which is what we normally do) she opened her eyes and calmed down. The wake window after that was normal. So I’ve no idea if she needed a longer nap or something else was happening. She always seems to wake up crying even if she fell asleep in the crib in the first place.

Next, my husband took her for a stroll and after that things fell apart. He thought she dozed off for maybe 5-10 minutes 1h30m into her wake window, but it’s hard to tell with this stroller as she’s facing away from him… anyway, they came back and I needed to take care of some urgent business, and when I came back it was about 2h10m of wake time and I immediately started the nap routine. She was having none of it. I tried for half an hour, even the bottle wasn’t working at all. The only thing that calmed her for a while was the bedtime story I do for nighttime. But didn’t make her sleepy. She was crying until i took her out of the bedroom at 18:25 and was happily playing and laughing for a while more.

This last nap is the most problematic lately as there’s a very small margin for error. It’s harder to wait for tired signs, but also if the nap happens too late then the bedtime will also be late.

So anyway, she was playing until maybe 18:50, then my husband tried to feed her and start the nighttime routine, but she was already getting fussy. Soon after she was having a meltdown in my arms like the bad old purple days. After 15 minutes of that she fell asleep in my arms, then 10 minutes after that I put her into the crib. She started crying again, so I just gave her the bottle since she didn’t actually have her usual evening meal and she likes to eat a lot before sleep. She ate for a bit and fell asleep at 19:30. Which is again too early for her usual bedtime, but there was clearly no other option. At 19:39 she again looked like she was waking up, but in the end stayed asleep this time. With all that her last wake window ended up being 3h28m.

This time she didn’t wake up and transitioned into night sleep without issues. She slept for 3.5 hours… And woke up 4 times, which is somewhat better than last few times. In the morning she woke up at 7:35.

Hey total sleep still works out to roughly 13.5 hours per day even with the failed naps, most of it is just happening at night.

During the night it’s also harder to resettle her, especially after the diaper change (it used to be she’s be fast asleep by the time it was done, not even taking any more milk, this time i even had to pick her up). She does a lot of that raising her legs and forcefully throwing them down, i try to give her time to fall asleep on her own, but most times she ends up crying for help.

I hope that gives you a good idea of what our schedule is like, as the timings and nap lengths are typical… well, except for the last nap and that whole evening disaster

Update: it’s the evening of next day and we’ve again tried and tried and failed to get her to fall asleep for the fourth nap, even though she was showing tired signs in the beginning. She ended up staying awake for 4.5 hours! Finally fell asleep at around 19:30 again after a shower and a feed

• This reply was modified 10 months, 3 weeks ago by  Ekaterina Agievich.

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

I wanted the update to be positive as I’d been super successful for a while, getting her to sleep without the bottle most times and even resettling her without walking around again, at most sitting on the bed with her in my arms. But just as I thought we might move on to getting her to sleep while im sitting… something happened.

It’s been a few days now and every nap time is war. Rocking her to sleep in any position doesn’t work, but in fairness feeding to sleep is also now hit or miss. A couple of times now we even ended up skipping a nap after trying for too long as we’re now plagued by false starts. It doesn’t even seem to matter whether she’s under/over-tired or perfectly tired to go to sleep without protest, a few minutes after she’s asleep in the crib she starts stirring and whining and eventually if I fail to get her back to sleep immediately she’s wide awake and nothing works on her.

My guess is we hit sleep regression (or it hit us like a train). Night sleep is still reasonably good, but timings changed. She doesn’t always do the first big stretch now, but closer to morning she might do another good one (like 3-4 hours, so basically instead of typical 6-2-2-1 it might be 4-3-3-1 or 3-1-4-4, it’s very random now). I’ve moved on from trying to feed her every time she wakes at night to trying to shush first if it wasn’t enough time for her to actually go hungry. But yeah… naps are pretty much me hovering over her for 40 minutes shushing and hoping she doesn’t wake up too soon and having that hope dashed increasingly more often. It might be 30 minutes, 20 minutes, or she might wake up 5 minutes after being placed in the crib and after another 30 minutes of trying to re-settle her we give up and wait for the next nap (which may also be a shorter one as she’s to exhausted to get proper sleep, I guess).

So anyway, just wanted to let you know. Im still trying to remove the bottle association, but sometimes it’s the only thing she wants, and sometimes nothing works at all. Also she doesn’t want her dad to put her to sleep anymore it seems, which is driving me a bit crazy as I get no breaks

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

Yes, the side-lying position, that’s the name I was looking for when I said I sort of cradle her! It’s very successful when her crying gets out of control (like after vaccination or even just if we let her stay up much too long), but she’s been fighting it lately. I think she either figured out that it’s being used exclusively to make her sleep (unlike tiger in a tree which she might also fight in the dark room, but is happy once we take her out) or she’s maybe just sore from all that tummy time she’s currently obsessed with and that position is not comfortable for some reason. But when she lets me, I’ll try using it as you suggested.

Holding her arms after transferring is a great tip! I’ve tried it (and squeezed a little) while patting and shushing, and that calmed her down, no bottle. Makes sense, I guess, even if she didn’t accept swaddling, she must feel it’s me holding her instead of fabric.

I’ve ordered a new white noise machine which arrives today, hopefully there’s something on there that works for her. So far we’ve tried just static and the sound of rain (without the thunder). I heard some babies get knocked out by the sound of hairdryer, so who knows 😀

I think we’ll start with option 2 (or rather keep doing it with the improvements you suggested), and once we’re able to consistently transfer her and calm her without the bottle when she wakes in the crib, we may have some success with option 1. I might add to it stroking her forehead, that works nicely sometimes if she’s already calm in the crib, but we’ll see, first things first.

Thank you so much for all your help. I’ll update in a while about our progress. I expect it’ll take a couple of weeks at least to move from option 2 to option 1

Update: oh I forgot to answer about rolling. She can only roll from back to tummy and has no idea how to roll back, so it wouldn’t be safe yet. If she happens to roll in her sleep, which is thankfully extremely rare for now, she gets stuck at the crib’s side and panics, so at most during a nap I stabilise her on her side and let her sleep like that while im watching her closely. Otherwise, whenever she’s placed on her side, she’ll try to roll forward and she haven’t quite figured out yet how to get her arm from under her every time + she’s too excited on her tummy, I’ve tried once letting her complete the roll in the crib, and she treated it like play, not rest

• This reply was modified 11 months, 1 week ago by  Ekaterina Agievich. Reason: Forgot to mention rolling

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

Please take your time and I hope your daughter gets better soon. In the meantime I keep attempting to get mine to sleep in my arms and then transferred to the crib. We have good days (4 out of 5!) and bad days (yeah… zero the next days). Looking forward to seeing what you come up with, but again no stress

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Sure 🙂 If we’re talking a typical day and not outliers like 3 naps a day and/or longer naps, it’s now like this (I could send you screenshots from the app im using, where everything seems to like up nicely, but I don’t see an attachment button…):

13-15 hours total sleep (most often around 14h, and the difference is made up of night wakings that might be linger and the time it takes to settle her in the evening)

Naps are still typically 40 minutes, but she’s also been having shorter naps lately and also more nighttime wakings (I hope we’re not already heading into the sleep regression)

7:15-7:45 wake up

9:00-9:30 first nap start

9:40-10:20 first nap end

The next 3 naps will happen after 1.5-2h wake time (I’m counting the time it takes to settle her to sleep, and not counting the time she’s asleep in my arms as she wakes up in the crib anyway). I do worry about the quality of those naps as she’ll often keep the bottle tit in her mouth and you can’t let it out – she’ll either suck it right in or wake up. She might even drink a little during the nap. Her doctor thinks she’s getting enough sleep just going by how her health is, but…

The final wake time can be up to 3h, but we try to make it less exciting. Initially we tried to fit another nap in there when she was smaller, but the timings don’t work out now. Either she headed right into night sleep too early, or it took such a long time to settle her , that she would be asleep by 8pm.

Then at 19:30-20:00 we start the nighttime routine

During the night she usually sleeps the first big stretch of 5-6 hours (except for the last 2 nights it’s been only 3-4h and im so tired), and then 2-3h stretches. The last one is often the shortest (1-1.5h)

During the day she’s getting plenty of stimulation from tummy time (she actually gets angry if I roll her to her back even if she’s already super tired and can’t lift her head anymore), plenty of talking, playing together and independently in the play gym (we have one from Lovevery and their toy subscription), babybjorn bouncer with two sets of toys and being carried around (99% of the time on her belly or almost vertically). Not going outside much (we keep trying, but she hates it so far, hope to transition her to reclined stroller seat in a month or two). So if we’re looking for whether she gets over or understimulated, my bet would be on overstimulated

We’re tracking wake times and looking for tired cues, but I can’t say we’re 100% successful at that, sometimes it gets to the point of her crying. But other times she just readily closes her eyes once in my arms and is sleeping after the first verse of the lullaby. But in both cases, once I put her down, she’s sort of panicking and rooting and immediately calms down with the bottle. I think, if I’m rocking her for longer once she’s asleep, that’s when I have more success calming her once in the crib with just shushing and patting. But I could be wrong, of course

Oh and I usually stay with her during the naps. Stupid creaky IKEA bed wakes her up if I try to move

PS: and here’s an example of kinda-sorta successful nap from today. It was a third nap, and she was generally in a very good mood today. Fed her right after she woke up. I saw her eyebrows turn red at about 1h10m after she woke up, but she was generally still very lively. I picked her up into tiger in a tree and we were just walking around, looking into the mirror, i was describing things i see… she was very vocal, sounded like she was complaining about something in her language while I carried her around. Then she started looking sort of zoned off in my arms, so we moved to the dark bedroom and I rocked her for a while while singing. She didn’t fall asleep, though, and my muscles were already pretty sore, so I put her in the crib and gave her the bottle. She drank a little while I sang and patted her, then she turned away and seemed to be asleep. So I switched to shushing and started the sleep timer. 4 minutes in she started turning her head and opening her eyes sometimes, then she stretched and rubbed her eyes. At this point I usually give her the bottle, but instead I picked her up in a cradle position (sort of) and rocked her again. She was asleep soon, i rocked for another couple of minutes and then put her down (it’s much easier not to disturb her in this position + she looked like she was in pretty deep sleep), she stirred, but didn’t wake up. I shushed for a bit just in case and left the room (yay, that almost never works because even to just put her down I need to at least put one knee on the stupid bed, she’s 6260g by now)

• This reply was modified 11 months, 1 week ago by  Ekaterina Agievich. Reason: Added example in PS

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

That does sound good, but we run into the next problem: once she’s asleep in my (or my husband’s) arms, we transfer her into the crib (or even just our bed to make it easier, but it doesn’t help), she immediately starts moving frantically and whining, not yet fully awake but obviously seeking the bottle. If we try soothing her without the bottle first, we either succeed (it’s those success cases) or she wakes up fully. If we do give her what she wants, she calms down immediately, drinks for a bit and falls back asleep. Ideally we need to go another round instead, right? Pick her up, rock her to sleep again. If she’s not having it, then give her the bottle? Sometimes she just starts squirming wildly in our arms and getting more agitated.

Could you suggest other tricks that we might add to our arsenal? Swaddling doesn’t work (and she’s started rolling over already anyway, so at most we do a sleep sack with legs), I didn’t notice any difference with or without white noise (should I keep trying different types?), we’ve tried 3 different pacifiers (and anyway that would be almost just as bad as the bottle if she gets really dependent on it… recently saw a toddler running around the supermarket with a pacifier in their mouth). Im not convinced that patting is doing anything for her. Shushing seems to work during the night at least, and the lullaby only works together with rocking or feeding. I think also stroking her forehead helps, but when she’s already calm (and has a bottle). Stroller, carrier and car seat are only pissing her off. The room is not perfectly dark, but it’s as dark as I can get it. When I’m googling, I only see these suggestions and I’m out of ideas

Best regards,

Kate

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

The heatwave has passed where we live, but we generally have a rather hot summer until the end of September, which can be really uncomfortable between climate change and Austrian aversion to AC… luckily, outside of heatwaves even though the days are up to 30 degrees, the nights are around 16-18.

I think we’ve more or less stabilised her wake up time around 7:30. But that’s all the good news… She’s regressed to really needing the bottle, I think because of the stress and discomfort of the last vaccination round and it kinda stuck with her. Right now I succeed in getting her to sleep without the bottle 1-2 times a day, and that means putting her into the crib already sound asleep, no drowsy-but-awake stuff. More often what happens is I feed her, she’s relaxed and showing sleepy cues (like rubbing her eyes, zoning off, yawning), but when I start rocking her and singing, she’ll start struggling and sometimes even crying in my arms. Then, in many cases (or eventually after trying other positions) once I put her down like that into the crib, give her the bottle and start shushing and patting… she’s out like a light. Except she’ll often still hold on to the bottle and I’m not able to take it out of her mouth without waking her. I’ve tried many times. Sometimes she’ll turn away from it herself and sleep, but mostly she’ll keep it for ~20 minutes or even the whole nap. That’s the part I hate the most.

I’m trying the routine you suggested for all naps and night sleep, just not succeeding much lately. And I keep wondering… how long can I repeat it up and down the pyramid before I must give up so that she gets some sleep? Is there a time limit like “by this time she should’ve woken up, but she’s still not asleep” or “her max awake window is 2h and she’s been awake 2.5h, get her down by any means necessary”? Let’s assume I have the energy to do this infinitely, at what point does it do more harm than good? Or is it always going to be bad to give her the bottle in the crib and reinforce the habit and better to hold out and sacrifice some days of good sleep schedule?

I hope that made sense…

We used to have much better luck rocking her to sleep, and the first two days after the vaccination she was so upset she’d even let me cradle her and fall asleep like that, but now it seems even her favourite tiger in a tree is somehow uncomfortable. The vaccination was Monday morning, so I think she should be feeling ok by now, we didn’t have any big side effects.

Best regards,

Kate

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

The heatwave should break today, hopefully. I think by Monday things will have gone back to normal. But I’m already trying, just not very insistently. Her feeding is still all chaotic and I can’t carry her around long enough in this weather, we both get uncomfortable before she gets sleepy.

Most times she’ll still demand the bottle. One of the naps she was even making loud sucking noises while I was rocking her (though I’m not convinced she isn’t just enjoying this new sound she figured out how to make). When she’s sleepy in her bed without it, she’ll wiggle and turn her head and eventually start crying. Do you think it’s better to try and go cold turkey, or give in after a while if she’s not falling asleep? I think it’s still kinda age appropriate to want to fall asleep while feeding, so going gradual is better for everyone’s sanity?

And of course I’ll be trying to stabilise her sleep schedule some more as you suggested. I have a nice app that helps track all things baby that I occasionally use, I’ll just go back to noting down her sleep times again.

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

Thanks for acknowledging there is an issue, people around me tend to say I overthink things 🙂

First, regarding her bedtime/wake-up times, I would say they are mainly within 30-60 minutes most of the time, with some occasional hiccups, but lately (for the last 2 days, yet to see how today’s bedtime works out…) she tends to wake up after one 40-minute cycle when I put her to bed at 8-8:30pm (and then she goes back to sleep pretty quickly, so I’m not sure where this false start came from, whether it’s the heat or her dependence on the bottle is getting worse), and mornings are… tricky to put my finger on when it actually begins. You see, mostly she wakes up at 7-7:30am. But sometimes she’ll wake up, I’ll let in the light, she’s definitely awake and interacting, but as soon as I give her the bottle… she might fall back asleep. Like today she actually slept that way until 8:30 and we ended up with 4 naps. And some days (most days…) she’ll start waking up around 5am, drinking a little, going back to sleep, then waking again… all the way until 7. I’m not sure what I can do short of making her wake up after she fell asleep eating, but is that alright to do at this age? I thought we needed to follow her cues. At other times of day if she does fall asleep while eating (and she’s already had a nap), it’s really brief, not an hour like in the morning.

Something else I was wondering is if you would be happy to try tweaking
her pre-sleep routine slightly so that she has the opportunity to fall
asleep in the crib without the bottle?

Yes, of course. But every time I try, she seems to lose the sleepiness. Feed-sing-pat seem to work as a whole package pretty quickly. Just feeding on its own works most times and takes longer. But taking out (moving to earlier) the bottle hasn’t worked for me yet 🙁 At most, when she falls asleep and I take away the bottle too quickly and wake her up, then I have a chance of re-settling her with just shushing/patting.

– Does she like or tolerate being held and rocked in your arms when she is tired?

She does like it, but only if it’s “tiger in a tree” position. We do it before putting her into bed most times, as otherwise she may cry and demand to be picked up and carried around.

– Would she tolerate having a feed on your lap while you are in the bedroom?

A definite no from her since… I think 2-3 weeks old. She hates that position, keeps squirming and complaining. Only ever happens in extreme circumstances (e.g. last week she went full-blown hysterical in the car seat and we had to take her out. I held her on my lap and gave her the bottle, that calmed her down)

– Do you have a bedtime routine that you do with her every night? Or is it the same as the nap routine you outlined?

Our nap routine is the shortened bedtime routine. Story time is the main difference (though right now I don’t think she even acknowledges it most times… yesterday I thought she actually paid attention, but it’s hard to tell), and the diaper change doesn’t always make sense before a nap.

I look forward to seeing your suggested routine 🙂

Best regards,

Kate

Update: today was the hottest day of the heatwave, her feeding is completely random (pretty much drinking non-stop in small portions and briefly falling asleep in random places where she was feeding… spent one of her naps on a play gym, in fact). So I failed in putting her to sleep the usual way for the latest nap, picked her up and rocked her to sleep in “tiger in a tree” position with a lullaby, then put her in the crib (she woke up a little), shushed and patted her back to sleep. She made sucking motions for a bit, but I think we have a good chance of fixing her feed-to-sleep association. I’m pretty bad at putting her in the crib from that position, though, she often cries when I do

[Ekaterina Agievich]

Hi Emma,

Thanks for the questions, this will give me a chance to structure this a bit in my own head. The only problem is our schedule is somewhat disrupted by the heat wave that recently hit Europe, since Austria is not big on AC. I think the baby is more or less comfortable (she now sleeps uncovered in a short-sleeved bodysuit instead of a sleep sack, but that doesn’t affect her sleep as much as I thought it would), but she is thirsty more often, so instead of full feeds before nap she tends to split them to before and after nap.

On to your questions:

1. Not exactly, it’s more like this:

• Once
  we notice tired cues, change diaper, then carry her around the
  apartment for a bit (I’m hoping with time, when she’s older, it become a
  “say goodnight to stuff” thing) until she’s ok with being put down in
  the crib
• (here we used to also put her in the sleep sack for night sleep, but now it’s too hot)
• Give her a bottle, let her eat for a while so she doesn’t fall asleep before eating enough
• At this point she might still not be settled and we’ll pick her up and carry her for a bit, especially to let the air out
• When
  she’s eaten maybe 2/3 of her usual portion, start with reading a calm
  sleepy story or go directly to singing and patting while she finishes
  eating
• Once her her eyes have been closed for a few minutes, I switch to shushing
• Then after another minute I remove my hand from her belly, keep shushing and wait for her to release the bottle
• Shush some more without the bottle until she’s completely still
• Sometimes at this point she’ll open her eyes and I have to go back to bottle-shush-pat. Here’s where I think we have proof that she’s relying on the bottle tot fall asleep, because she’ll pretty quickly close her eyes and fall asleep once she has the bottle back in her mouth, she won’t even eat much (I’ve tried replacing with a pacifier, instant disgust… and anyway that can be replacing one bad habit with another). Sometimes (rarely) i succeed to get her back to sleep with just shushing or that and the trick below
• I also use that little trick where you gently stroke down the middle of a baby’s forehead and down their nose to get them to close they’re eyes when it seems like she’s almost there but needs that little push to fall asleep. But that’s not part of the routine, just a situational thing

2. So our intermediate goal is to move it to first step of the routine and do it in the other room, but we’ve started with just letting her finish the bottle in the crib without the other things (but after changing the diaper), then try to do the other steps. these days she’ll also eat right after waking (I think she’s thirsty because of the heat)

3. She typically wakes around 7-8am (rarely at 6am, but then she’s very cranky and has smaller wake windows all morning)

4. Anywhere between 8-10pm, typically in the middle of this range

5. She’s having a ~40 minute nap after 1.5 hour wake time, give or take. I think that comes up to 5 naps. And her last wake time before night sleep is typically slightly longer

6. Typically 40 minutes. If she settles back to sleep after that, she won’t sleep more than 5 minutes. And she’s not always looking rested when she wakes up. I think she’s pretty reliant on the bottle to prolong the nap.

Also during the night, she wakes up 1 or 2 times before 4am, then after that she tends to wake up frequently, drink a little and fall back asleep (that’s the worst part for me)

Another detail, she also doesn’t settle in a stroller without the bottle. It was looking hopeful before the heat wave, she was starting to happily stay awake in the stroller for maybe 15 minutes and I thought we might soon switch to walks during her awake time, but now it’s too hot outside for her.

PS: I have to mention that we’re using a safe bottle tit that doesn’t leak on its own, she has to actively suck for anything to come out