Napping has become increasing difficult with Doodle.\u00a0 As a newbie he used to peacefully fall asleep while nursing and then I could usually gently move him somewhere to complete his sleep.\u00a0 Now, however, even if he does fall asleep nursing (which usually only happens at night now) he doesn\u2019t sleep long and if I try to move him he wakes up instantly and nap time is done.<\/p>\n
He has also always easily fallen asleep in the car and buggy.\u00a0 While he will stay asleep when I take him out of the car in his car seat he wakes up within about 15 minutes if he isn\u2019t in the buggy where movement continues.\u00a0 Especially at home, no matter where I put him in his seat or how quiet we are, he is up shortly after coming in.<\/p>\n
We had about a week where Doodle did not take a proper nap at all.\u00a0 He took lots of cat naps, little half hour sleeps throughout the day but no good, long stretches and the end of last week I started getting really frustrated with him.\u00a0 From the time he was tiny he has taken a longer afternoon nap around the same time the girls do but he stopped going down easily.\u00a0 He was getting over tired and then the only way I could get him to fall asleep was to swaddle and nurse him.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m trying to break the nurse to sleep habit since he is still waking at least once a night and wants to be nursed back to sleep.\u00a0 During one of these night feeds, I had a flash back to Sugarplum.\u00a0 When she was a bit older than Doodle is now she went through a similar phase but she wouldn\u2019t nurse to sleep during the day time at all.\u00a0 We ended up having to wedge her on her side between funky monkey and Hooey in her Moses basket with music or the TV on and vigorously rock her where she couldn\u2019t see us until she cried herself to sleep. And then we had to beg and plea with Honeybun\u00a0to not make a noise that might wake her up.\u00a0 Luckily we are nowhere near that level yet with Doodle(only because the boob still works!)<\/p>\n
So what I\u2019ve started doing which has had success in 3 out of 3 tries is: \u00a0When he starts to act tired I go for the nap, I don\u2019t wait for him to become hysterical as I was before.\u00a0 I turn on his lights and sounds machine and swaddle him tight.\u00a0 I lay him in his crib and gently rock him side to side.\u00a0 If he tries to engage me, I\u2019ll smile back at him but I try not to talk and I don\u2019t stop the rocking.\u00a0 If he starts flailing, kicking or fussing I just keep going with the rocking.\u00a0 Eventually he peacefully falls asleep and I do a little victory dance as I leave the room.\u00a0 My hope is that by doing this routine regularly during the day he will eventually need less and less time rocking (it\u2019s been less than 10 minutes each time anyways) and that eventually we\u2019ll be able to use the same technique at night so hubby can help soothe him back to sleep some nights.\u00a0 And eventually I\u2019m hoping just putting him down wrapped up and with the familiar sounds will be enough for him to put himself to sleep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Napping has become increasing difficult with Doodle.\u00a0 As a newbie he used to peacefully fall asleep while nursing and then I could usually gently move him somewhere to complete his sleep.\u00a0 Now, however, even if he does fall asleep nursing (which usually only happens at night now) he doesn\u2019t sleep long and if I try […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,16,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baby-business","category-breastfeeding","category-family-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1553"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1963,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions\/1963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}