Coming to terms with having a lower sleep needs baby
I have an 8 month old who is the absolute light of my life! They make me and my husband so happy, and I often wonder how we could be so lucky to have such a wonderful LO. However, we struggled with sleep from day dot, fighting naps, awake for hours upon hours in the newborn phase and contact napped exclusively. After a lot of hard work learning about and implementing good sleep practices/sleep training methods, we have got a solid routine down - in no small part thanks to this group!!! We still have our moments of course, but I feel so lucky as I know so many people struggle with this. I have found 99% of the time when we have a wobble, the answer is less sleep 😂
However, our LO has a 24 hour sleep tank of 11.5 hours - so 1.5 hours of naps across 2 naps, and 10 hours at night. I see so many people saying their baby gets 13.5 hours in a day and I sometimes feel so jealous! We were on that at 4 months and it has dropped steadily ever since. I'm physically and mentally knackered, especially as we are in our frustration learning to crawl phase and being completely honest it's really taken me a while to come to terms with the fact I have a baby on the lower end of sleep needs. I know it's not even super low, but it still feels really hard!
I suppose I'm just looking for some solidarity - has anyone else found this, and did you ever find your baby's sleep increased once they started to expend more energy crawling/walking etc? Speaking to some mums at baby classes etc they haven't sleep trained and don't fully understand the 24 hour sleep needs, so it feels hard for them to comprehend what I'm going through as they will just put the baby down for another nap and not have it fought!