[Didier Jani]

Hi Emma,

Thank you for your quick and thorough response!

Regarding the catnaps, I’m happy to say that we seem to have moved past that stage, as she’s now taking longer naps again.

As for night feeds, she still needs one after about five and a half hours of sleep, so we’re just waiting for her to naturally stretch that first part of the night.

I think you are right about the fluctuations in daytime intake, and thank you for the tip about feeding her in a room with fewer distractions. We’ve noticed for a few weeks now that it’s been much harder for her to finish a bottle because she’s so interested in everything around her.

However, we’re still struggling with early morning wakings. At first, I thought it started on days when she didn’t nap well and her last nap ran too long, but now it feels really difficult to reverse the pattern.

So for two days, we focused on better and longer naps and put her to bed 15 minutes earlier (7:45 p.m.). On those two days, she slept until 6:40 a.m. and 6:20 a.m. But then, despite another day of good naps and a 7:30 p.m. bedtime, she woke up at 4:50 a.m.! The next day, with good naps and a 7:45 p.m. bedtime, she woke at 5:00 a.m. Now she consistently wakes up between 5:00 and 5:20 a.m., even though bedtime is still between 7:45 and 8:00 p.m. and naps remain good.

When I say good naps, I mean two naps of 1.5 to 2 hours (sometimes even 2.5 or 3 hours for one of them), plus a short one at the end of the day (45 minutes to 1 hour), so she gets around 4 to 5 hours of daytime sleep. I can’t give exact times because it wasn’t very consistent, but before the early morning wakes, her schedule started to look something like this:

• Morning wake-up: 7:00 a.m.
• First
  nap: 8:30 to 10:00 or 10:30
• Second nap: around 12:00 or
  12:30 to 2:00 or 2:30–3:00
• Last nap: around 5:00 p.m.

BUT now, with her very early wake-ups, her first nap is from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m., then a second nap from 11:30 to 2:00 or 2:30 p.m., and a short 45-minute nap at 4:30 p.m. Sometimes she also takes an additional 45-minute contact nap, but I can’t be very precise since it’s new and the rhythm is a bit off.

So to sum up, she’s now getting enough daytime sleep, yet she still wakes up too early. Her night sleep is about 9 to 9.5 hours, which is clearly not enough—so it’s not that she has maxed out her total sleep. I’m starting to think that the first nap is too early, and that it reinforces the disrupted sleep schedule.

Would you agree? I’ve read that we might need to push the first nap later, since it feels like she’s actually finishing her night during that first nap. What would you recommend we do?

I forgot to mention that when she wakes up, she doesn’t cry like she’s hungry—she screams, vocalizes, laughs, and kicks. She’s really wide awake, and it’s nearly impossible not to respond. We’ve tried waiting for 10 minutes, but she only escalates. Only once did she wake up crying; we fed her, but it didn’t make a difference.

Thanks again for taking the time to read our message.

Didier and Elisa

P.S.: I forgot to ask — I suppose that since she’ll be 4 months old in a few days, it’s becoming important to start setting more regular feeding times, without being too rigid. For now, she doesn’t eat at fixed times, especially since she’s not very greedy and gets easily distracted, so she often finishes her bottle in two parts during her awake time. Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this too!

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by  Didier Jani.