Not sure where to start—good nights but terrible naps
My 5 month old has been a pretty good sleeper at night but utilizing probably unsustainable methods. She will have a very long, sleepy nurse to sleep (which is usually our cue that she is in fact actually ready for bed) and I lightly jostle her slightly awake upon transfer to her crib which usually helps prevent a false start. We start the feed sometime between 7 7:30, and she’s usually in her crib sometime between 7:45 and 8:30. She might have a couple tiny wakes at night but very rarely needs help falling back asleep, and will have typically one wake to feed which has been after a 5-7 hour stretch of sleep. She has slept through the night once. She usually gets between 10 and 11 hours of sleep at night and we wake her by 7:30am but she usually wakes on her own between 7-7:30.
The issue is naps. We’re kind of in a transition period from 4 to 3 naps so that isn’t helping anything, she seems to be most comfortable with wake windows around 2 hours at this point. Not only does she not take a nap longer than 30 minutes unless she’s in a carrier or contact nap, but she cries and screams when we try to start a crib nap. At first we thought we were missing the timing that she was tired not sleepy, and the pacifier became our clue—if she took it she was sleepy enough, but then it seemed like her wake windows needed to get longer and we literally cannot get her to nap in her crib without lots of screaming. We do not feed to sleep at nap times and she has bottles during the workday while I work. She’s been getting between 2-2.5 hours of hard fought daytime sleep recently and I’m just at a complete loss of how to help her go down for naps without the chaos or extended ordeal.
Her nights are so good but I know this probably isn’t sustainable and I don’t know how to work on the naps without having to mess with the nights.