r/TakingCaraBabies

Newly minted 5 month old, we moved from a 4-nap schedule (1.5/1.75/1.75/2/2) to a 3-nap schedule (1.75/2/2/2.25) one week ago. Since then, his daytime naps have shortened to 30-45 minutes and we often can't even rescue them anymore. Fights bedtime now and screams for 20-30 minutes before falling asleep, where he used to fuss quietly for maybe 1-2 minutes before sleeping. Is also waking up more overnight again (still eating 2x/night, but is waking up an additional 2x now, cries for a few minutes and will go back to sleep).

Now he keeps waking earlier and earlier every morning, where he was consistently waking at 7am, it's been moving back about 15 minutes every day, so bedtime is also creeping earlier and earlier, today was 6:10pm.

We switched nap schedules because he was consistently fighting the 4th nap and bedtime was getting pushed later and later, but now I feel like we broke him. He was well-rested and happy, and now he is just grumpy for a big part of the day.

Do we go back to 4 naps? We have the hardest time knowing if he is under or overtired, and are at a loss of where we go from here.

We have an 8 months old and we’ve been trying to sleep train him using gentle approaches ever since he was 5.5 months old. Yesterday we gave up on that and after seeking advice on reddit many times, we decided to just to try Ferber.

The first night went better than expected! Though after 3 checkins we noticed he’s only escalating his cries so we stopped the checkins. It seems that Ferber relies on sleep pressure to make sure the baby is not undertired so he doesn’t cry for hours and hours. This worked really well for bedtime and his other 2 wake ups.

My question is, his last wake up was at 5:30am which seems to be his new wake up time (for the day) after the schedule adjustment (went from 2.5/3/3.5 to 2.45/3.25/3.75 to now 3/3.5/4.25 with total daytime sleep going down from 3h to 2.5h). He has very low sleep pressure at that point, do we keep doing the check in method until 6am? or do we leave him be until 6am?

Hello everyone!

FTM here! Our 9 month old slept through the night, no wakes, from 4 months to 8 months. He is combo fed since birth.

Around 8 months he started waking up multiple times crying. The majority of the time he wakes up between 7pm and 12am 2-3 times going back to sleep when given his paci and then he’ll either sleep the rest of the night or wake up once on no particular schedule with his paci getting him back to sleep most times. Other times a bottle or boob which I’d prefer not to get in the habit of.

Obviously I am so thankful for the period of time we got full nights sleep, and know we’re still lucky with these slight disruptions but I am curious to know if anyone else has experienced this and if there is anything they ‘did’ to help their LO back to continuous, peaceful sleep.

We have been to our chiro/CST, as well as, to our pediatrician who could not see his eardrum due to wax but there did not seem to be an infection which our CST agreed with. Our pediatrician recommended we put breastmilk in his ear, which we did try and he did sleep well that night but other nights we’ve tried it, nothings changed. Our CST suggested colloidal silver so we’ll be trying that tomorrow night.

Schedule is currently:
\~6:15/6:30 wake
\~9am 1st nap (usually sleeps about 1:20)
\~2pm 2nd nap (sometimes sleeps another 1:20 and others 35 mins)
Bedtime based on last wake window, about 3.75 hours but usually between 6:30 and 7:30.

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences!

My baby is 5.5 months old and has always had a very calm temperament and been a great sleeper. But for the past 2 weeks, she has become very active during the night. She isn't really awake, but she moves her arms, kicks, squirms, etc. for large portions of the night.

Sometimes she settles again with just a hand on her body, but other times I need to pick her up. She sleeps in a bassinet next to my bed and wears a sleep sack.

I'm not currently sleep training, but I'm starting to lean towards helping her learn to fall asleep independently and self-settle.

The confusing part is her daytime naps.

On weekends, when I'm home, her naps have been going really well. I'll put her down, and anything from 40 minutes onwards is great for me. If she wakes after 40 minutes, she is usually happy and content in her bassinet. Sometimes she even moves around a bit and then falls back asleep on her own.

During the week, I'm working and she's with our nanny. The nanny lets her fall asleep in her arms, which I'm completely fine with because I do this sometimes too. She then puts her down in the crib.

The issue is that when the baby makes even the slightest movement around the 40-minute mark, the nanny immediately picks her up, rocks her in the rocking chair and then often holds her in her arms for another hour while she sleeps.

I personally would leave her if she's just moving around. If she wakes, she wakes. If she doesn't, she sometimes manages to fall back asleep by herself.

So now I'm wondering:

Should I ask the nanny to stop picking her up so quickly and give her a chance to resettle?

Is holding/rocking her back to sleep for another hour completely fine at this age?

Could the difference between our nap approaches be contributing to her current nighttime restlessness?

Could she be getting too used to being resettled by someone else and therefore struggling to self-settle at night?

Or is this just a normal developmental phase around 5–6 months, and I'm overthinking the whole thing?

I'm not trying to do strict sleep training. I just want to encourage good sleep habits without making her unnecessarily cry or forcing anything.

Would love to hear what others did around this age, especially if you had a similar situation with a nanny/daycare during the week and a different approach at home on weekends.

Hello! We think baby is ready to drop to 2 naps indicated by the 2/3 naps. She just turned 33 weeks and will be 8m next Monday. My largest question revolves around managing breastfeeding and solids but want to give extra details about her general schedule…

3 nap sched: 2.5/2.5/2.5/3 wake at 7am bed between 7:30&8pm. Total sleep capped at 3h spread between the 3 naps. Sometimes last catnap is 15min.

We nursed when she woke up, after each nap, and about 30m before bed. She also wakes twice a nice to nurse which I am fine with but she’s also dropped to one night waking for nurse here and there.
She had breakfast lunch and dinner about 1h after nursing as well.

Ideally we get to a point where she takes 2 x 1.5h naps at the same time every day, not necessarily based on wake windows…

My biggest concern is how do I manage nursing and solids during this time of longer wake windows and hopefully longer naps. I typically feed on demand but that ends up being every 3/4 h depending on nap length during a 3 nap day. If I continue with nursing after naps it seems like too long a time between sessions and while she eats solids she’s not eating a ton. Also, if I stick to every 3/4H but give her solids at the halfway mark of a wake window she would be getting solids before nursing a few times which I’m told I’m supposed to be nursing first and doing solids second. (Her weight is fine and has never been an issue)…

Feeling very confused and would love to hear from other EBF parents!

Hello everyone

My 10month old baby used to sleep through the night (11hours from 8p.m to 7a.m), with an average of 3h of sleep, sometimes more sometimes less (I would say between 2 and 4), and unless rare exceptions she never cried during the night.

We generally follow 3/3.5/4 wake windows. It can change a bit as she goes to daycare.

13 days ago she got sick (I don't have the english word but throat infection with fever), she got treated and better in a few days. But she woke at night and it was super hard to resettle. I used sometimes breastfeeding but she never falls asleep while breastfeeding.

It's been a week since she is cured but still wakes at night and it takes forever to put her back to sleep. From 1 to 2 hours. It starts between 1 and 5. We feel lost as nothing seems to work. Even using our hand to sooth her (which used to work super well), she sometimes calms herself but keeps her eyes open and starts crying again.

It usually starts with her fussing alternatively (a bit of fuss then she takes her thumb and tries to go back to sleep without success), we let her as long as it does not escalate, the. we try our hand to sooth her ... But it takes forever and even with that she sometimes get super mad.

I tried breastfeeding but she never falls asleep on it and most of the time it still takes 40 min at least before she falls asleep again. So not sure it helps but after 1hours ++ we get a bit desperate. We cannot let her figure it alone as it escalate a lot. If we leave after going into her room she cries a lot.

She falls asleep independantly since she is 5 months old, never changed (we had a brief separation anxiety but it solved itself quite fast). For nights and naps. And it's always super super fast (we put her in bed and she immediately closes her eyes, deep sleep within 10 min)

When she had these wake up during the night she sleep later on the morning, around 8 (we should maybe wake her up at 7 as before but we also are super tired and sometimes at 7 she only got back to sleep for 1 hour). She also seems quite sleepy during the day.

We know that slip night are often a rythm issue/undertireness, but it also feels too much of a coïncidence that before the sickness she was fine with 14/15 hours of sleep but now she gets 12/13 and still wakes up. We had days with shorter naps (only 2 hours) and still got those woke up.

Since then we still had 2 full nights but not days with shorter naps.

She does not seems umconfortable during the day

Do you have an idea of what is happening and how should we react ? We fist want to try to wake her up at 7 as before to see if that changes something but she just seems so sleepy ...

Thanks !

(sorry if the grammar is not perfect, English is not my first language)

Hi, All-happy Monday!

We are Certified Sleep Consultants from the Taking Cara Babies Team. Drop your questions for us below! We will answer questions Tuesday! 🙌🏻

Please keep questions brief. If you are in need of deep troubleshooting, please reach out via email at info@takingcarababies.com.

I started with the newborn class, and it went really well! Baby was putting himself to sleep at bedtime and for most naps.

Then…something happened at 3 months. He now needs to be rocked to sleep completely most nights and definitely for all naps.

My question is: will this skill come back on its own if we keep trying or should I consider implementing the abcs of sleep course at 5 months?

We started sleep training at 4 months with the chair method and noticed that was not working because his cries were intense each night. Switched to Ferber and each check in made his cry worse. We were working with a sleep consultant at the time who told us at the end of the two week plan that he has FOMO and the cries will reduce as he gets older.

He is now 5 months old. We had a few nights with minimal crying but a lot of the time was around 30-60 mins of crying. Sometimes that looks like on and off crying and sometimes it is scream crying for majority of it. We did some schedule changes and noticed when his last nap is 15 mins it helps.

He is on 2/2.5/2.75/3. We got to a point last week where his crying was 20-30 mins. Still a lot but we were happy to see improvement.

Get about 2.5-3hrs of daytime sleep and 9.5-10.5 overnight. Even with schedule changes he still cries intensely. When I was putting him to sleep he still takes a long time and whines and is very squirmy so I’m thinking it’s his temperament.

If that’s the case, is it better to wait until he’s older to try again or should we keep going at it? It’s been a little over a month of this. He’s got the skill because he can do it for naps just fine. Just bedtime is a struggle. When he’s asleep he’s usually good for the night with no wakings or minimal wakings.

LO just turned 4 months old and we are considering dropping from 4 naps to 3 as we’re having ongoing nap issues and more recently overnight has gotten worse (not sure if 4 month sleep regression or if baby is still screwed up from a vacation a couple weeks ago, or both!)

Current schedule (roughly) is feed at 7am/10am/1pm/4pm/7pm, then 10pm dream feed, then LO usually wakes up somewhere 2-4am (for a while we were getting him 4-5am but like I said we’ve been screwed up since a recent vacation and haven’t gotten back to that). Wake windows are typically 1.5-2 hours. He does some excellent naps in the crib sometimes, but often wakes up the second he gets put down. Now that I’m back to work my husband is home and he has a particularly hard time, some days he can’t get LO to sleep more than 10 minutes here and there and LO just screams all day.

I’m wondering if we should try to drop the 4th nap and see if that helps with other naps, and with overnight sleep. My question is how that works with feeds - we do eat/play/sleep all throughout the day, so if we drop a nap are we also dropping a feed? I worry that LO would then wake up an extra time overnight because he’s hungry. Or how does it work if you don’t drop a feed - do you feed earlier, or make the wake window extra long? For instance, if I feed at 4:00 and then keep him awake until he eats at 7:00 and then do a bedtime routine, he’ll be pushing 4 hours awake at that point. So just confused on how that all works logistically.

Also looking for a little reassurance that we’re on the right track 🥲 We got the newborn TCB course and have been doing CRIES and SIT BACK since the beginning, and like I said for a while we were getting from a 10pm feed to a 4-5am feed, but now we’ve backtracked to 2-4am (a couple nights ago it was even 1:30am), and he’s been having a lot more wakeups and needing to be settled back down numerous times throughout the night. So just a little worried that we’re not doing it right and should be doing better overnight by this point in time.

Sorry for long post TYIA!!

My baby is wonderful. He’s been a great nighttime sleeper from the start and with the help of this class. We can put him down awake and he will go to sleep for the night. He’s about to turn 4 months and is sleeping from about 7:-45-7 ish (sometimes wakes between 5:30-6:30 to eat).

Naps are another story. He will crib nap if put down practically asleep. If we try putting him down awake he will cry and scream and is inconsolable or will play until he’s extremely overtired and cries. I follow wake windows and sleepy cues and everything for him. I can put him down asleep and if he stirs and I have my hand on him for a minute he will go to sleep sometimes, normally during the first two naps.

BUT without fail every single time, he wakes up at 30 mins. There’s been a couple of times where when he stirs if we put our hand on him he can connect the sleep cycle, but mostly he wakes up crying and needs to be held the rest of his nap. It’s getting hard spending 3 hours everyday in the dark holding him.

HELP! Any advice or experiences is welcome. :)

I am a first time mum to a 3 month old & I need help deciding whether it’s a good idea to try sleep train. For the most part I believe he is a decent sleeper, has good naps through the day however most of the time they are contact naps & then I start his bedtime routine around 5:30-6, which is bath, pjs/sleep sack, bottle, rock to sleep. I will transfer him to his bassinet, then my partner gives him a dream feed before he goes to bed around 9:30-10, then back to bed. He generally wakes once overnight for a feed and then wakes up for the day around 5-6:30am.

I am just struggling with the broken sleep, always feeling like a zombie during the day, emotions are high, depending on caffeine to get me through.

So I want to know if it’s worth to try sleep train my LO now or should I wait until after 4 months, given the sleep regression that’s expected?

My goal is to drop the overnight feed, even if that’s moving his nighttime routine later or whatever needs to be done, so I can get a decent stretch overnight, which will help me be a better Mum to him.

Please be kind, any advice is appreciated.

Hello everyone, I have a quick question for all sleep trainers here. What do/did you do during daytime naps?

I know this question was asked a couple of times and there were a lot of valuable comments. But I'm having a hard time adjusting those great insights to our particular situation, which you'll understand from reading below;

Our baby girl (5 months) has been sleeping with multiple (3 to be exact) sleep associations for the past couple of months. These are;

-Pacifier (constantly putting back on all night long)
-Swaddle - Swaddle belt more recently because she has always been fighting regular swaddles, somehow finding a way to break free and waking herself up. She also had (still has to a point) a strong Moro Reflex.
-Rocking the crib, which is beside our bed. She wouldn't ever sleep unless we were rocking her crib.

The only consolation we had was that she was at least sleeping in her own crib, and not ask to sleep with us or on our lap.

So we decided yesterday to start ferber method and go cold turkey on all sleep associations.

First night went better than expected. She slept in about 30 minutes after 2 checkins, slept for 30 minutes, woke up, cried on and off for 2 hours, we fed her, resisted another 10 minutes and then slept for nearly 5 hours.

We also applied ferber method to daytime naps but it only worked for the first 2 naps. She fell asleep in about 10-15 minutes for the first 2 naps. 3rd nap of the day she cried non-stop for 90 minutes. Then the 4th nap, she cried again for almost an hour until we took her outside to the park. She slept in her stroller for 20 minutes.

Then we got back and after a routine of bath + feed + chill + we put her back. We are still at 2nd night and so far she;

fel asleep in 20 minutes
slept for 10
cried for 13 minutes
slept for 3 minutes
cried for 16 minutes
slept for 22 minutes
cried for 10 minutes
slept for 65 minutes
cried for 4 minutes
And she's been asleep for 3.5 hours now.

My question is, how should we handle the daytime naps moving forward? I meantioned we went cold turkey on all 3 sleep associations and daytime naps have been so chaotic so far in the first day.

I read about daytime naps and night sleeps being two separate sleep cycles but I'm still hesitant to use sleep associations during naps thinking it would hurt our night efforts.

What should we do? Should we introduce one or two of the 3 supports? If so, which one it should be?

And my other small question is that our baby has been jolting out of sleep when she's just about to sleep several times, sometimes 3 times in a minute. Does this mean moro reflex is still there? Should we maybe try again a month later or something?

One critical information: She has not been rolling yet. I guess there's still a few weeks until she does.

Thank you advance for all your valuable insights and your time!

Note: She slept 8.5 hours, without us ever intervening in the 2nd night. Daytime naps are still an issue though.

Starting with Night 3 now!

Please help. 13 month old somewhat sleep trained. Falls asleep independently after 5ish minutes of crying and sleeps for 40-50 minutes then wakes up and cries for anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour. We used to nurse her back to sleep after the first wake, but stopped about 2-3 weeks ago and have been letting her CIO but it doesn't seem like it's getting any better.

Bedtime: \~8pm

Wakes up to nurse once nightly around 1-3am (this is fine with everyone in the home and we're not interested in fully night weaning unless we need to)

Day wake: 7-7:30am and we almost always have to wake baby up

Wake windows vary. Roughly 3.5/3.5/4 if 2 naps, but some days she only does one nap. We always aim for at least 4 hours awake before bed. We cap daytime sleep at 2 hours total. Baby is not nap trained and most naps are contact naps.

Any ideas for how to stop the crying at bedtime and especially the waking up after one sleep cycle? Happy to provide additional info...ask away. Thank you.