6 month old sleep
My baby will be 6 months old tomorrow. I included a couple screenshots to show how things have gotten worse the last few days. We were in the trenches between 3-5 months and it FINALLY got better. He was consistently only waking once around 3-4 am and even slept 11 hour stretches a few times. Now he’s suddenly back to waking up multiple times and needing to feed earlier. My husband tries to settle him first but if he doesn’t, I go ahead and feed him (EBF). He often needs to be picked up multiple times if he wakes up after transfers.
I work Monday & Tuesday 8-6 and Thursday 12:30-6. My MIL watches him during those times. We exclusively contact nap, he has done crib naps before but it’s so time consuming to get him down I just don’t care anymore lol.
I thought we were finally transitioning to 3 naps but now he’s back to 4. Especially when my MIL is watching him because he tends to sleep better with me. Bedtime has been all over the place and I can’t figure out how to make it consistent because his last nap is never consistent. Wake up time is not consistent either, we never are the ones to wake him up because he usually wakes up way too early.
Do we just keep going? Does a 6 month old need more consistency? We mostly just try to follow his cues and have never implemented any kind of schedule. If we were to solidify bedtime a bit more, what time would make sense and how do we make that work based on his last nap? (For example, sometimes he is too tired by 6 pm to stay up but if he naps he will go to bed way too late)
Edit to add that last week we were on vacation staying with my parents and he slept AMAZING even being in a different environment, so I got my hopes up so much