r/TakingCaraBabies

My baby is about to turn 10 months old in 4 days. The last couple of days her wake windows have seemed to shift all of a sudden based on me observing her cues. She was doing really well on 3.5/3.5/4. And the last couple days it’s been more like 2.5/3/4

Anyone else experience this? Wondering if it’s possibly just related to teething or a growth spurt? She’s been SUPER fussy the last couple days.

Also this morning, she was up at 6:00am instead of her usual 6:30-6:40am wake up. 🙃

Our baby will only sleep a maximum 3 hours in her bassinet for her first night stretch then if we are lucky we will maybe get one 2 hour. After that she only sleeps an 40mins at a time because she can’t connect sleep cycles. The only thing saving me is cosleeping at that point. During the day she eats every 1.5 to 2hrs and for only 5 minutes at a time. I’m wondering if she is “snacking”. I’ve heard Cara say extending time in between feeds can lead to fuller feeds and longer sleep times. Has anyone tried this, did you have success?

Thank you

We have an eight month old baby who we have mostly fed to sleep and then transferred to her crib or co-slept with. I know she can connect sleep cycles because she has occasionally slept a 4-hour stretch at the beginning of the night. Most of the time, she wakes up about every two or more hours at night and the sleep deprivation was getting hard for me, but harder is spending up to an hour putting her down for naps multiple times per day. We have a two year-old and I didn’t know what to do with him while I put her down for naps. He was also having meltdowns every time I took the baby into the room to put her down and I think it’s because he knew I was going to be in there for a while.

She is no longer sleeping well in the baby carrier, won’t sleep in the car, won’t be rocked to sleep, and has a hard time falling asleep in the stroller.

We have previously been opposed to sleep training, but we’re at a loss of what to do so started modified Ferber/TCB 4 days ago.

She has screamed for about an hour each night at bedtime and sometimes for hours in the middle of the night, most of the time at a 10/10. I am setting an alarm for every 2.5 hours to give her dream feeds as that is about how often she was eating prior to sleep training and we are planning to gradually wean that while really focusing on daytime calories. Her wake windows are 2.5/3/3.5 (we just barely dropped her third nap as she was skipping it most days and becoming overtired). We’ve been tracking sleep using the Huckleberry app for over a month now so I think we are pretty close on our wake windows.

At this point, I am not convinced that she is learning to self soothe. I think she is literally screaming to the point of exhaustion. She starts screaming as soon as we get near her room which is new since we started sleep training. She also wakes up crying when she previously used to wake up happy. Her eyes are swollen and she’s losing her voice.

Based on hearing/reading about other people’s experiences, I expected the crying to lessen each night and eventually stop, but that has not been our experience. I’m afraid we are torturing our baby and will not see any results. At this juncture, neither her nor I are well rested and it is impacting my mental health.

We have tried more gentle methods like sitting next to her while she falls asleep, rocking her, singing to her, the chair method, and nothing seems to work except feeding her to sleep. That’s become difficult as nobody other than me can put her down.

I guess I am just asking for advice and/or reassurance that we are doing the right things. Are there any babies who are just not meant to be sleep trained? If this isn’t working for her, I would rather call it quits sooner rather than later and go back to feeding to sleep.

15 month old

Sleep trained

Goes to day care.

1 nap schedule for the past 3 months

Broken night sleep

Tried over tried under tired theories. Stuck to strict schedules. Went through back to back teething pain including molars. Tried pain relief to get longer sleep stretches (barely any help).

She is very comfortable falling asleep on her own in her own crib for a long a i can remember. So its not sleep association. Her room is pitch dark. It's not hunger, she refuses anything.

She wakes up crying and wants me to pick her up. She suppose crying as soon as she is picked up. I also tried letting her cry 2 to 3 mins before i went in, the only thing came out of it was that she fell sick. So now, I tried to calm her put her back in, early wakes it works Most times, some days split night. But anything after 3 pm if i try that its definitely a split night. So i carry her and let her fall asleep and transition her back to crib.

There were days in the past month. Where for a week she slept through the night. Even those nights she woke up sat for about 20 mins and slept back by herself. So i know she can do that.

Wake up 730 am

First nap 1230pm (usually lasts 1.5 hours)

Bad time 745pm (somedays she takes 2 mins to fall asleep. Somedays is 90 mins)

I can't survive this any longer as I'm a working mom and no help except my husband and he is exhausted too.

Just turned 18 months and for awhile he'd been doing well with a 5.5/5.5 or 6/5.5 schedule. 2 hour nap. He'd wake once or twice at night. After a long illness we had to re-establish independent sleep at bedtime. It took two nights and now he does well at bedtime but nighttime has absolutely fallen apart over the last month and now he has 3-4 night wakings. They're all over the place. Sometimes they're evenly spaced throughout the night. Sometimes he'll sleep a really long first chunk of the night and then wake every 30 min from 2-4am.

He does generally still have one feeding overnight which I know I need to work on weaning. It hadn't been causing issues before all this so I'm not sure if these issues are related or if we have a schedule issue or what.

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.

Sleep trained our daughter at almost 9 months old using Taking Cara Babies. Transitioned her to toddler bed at 2 years 9 months and need to rebuild her confidence. Purchased the Toddler course and practiced and prepped over the weekend (red and green light on Hatch, practiced getting into bed with a stuffy). Tonight was Night 1. Sat next to her. Took 10 minutes to fall asleep with 0 crying. I’m a little anxious about her waking up overnight but let’s see how it goes. 🤞🏼

**TLDR: 18 month old daughter is on a 1 nap schedule but she won’t sleep longer than 1-1.5 hours. She’s is also having EMW around 4-5:30am, if I nurse her back to sleep she’ll sleep for another 1.5 hours. WW’s are 5.5 hrs & 4.5 hrs. TIA**

My 18 month old daughter has been a great sleep since early on, we formally sleep trained her around 6 months. She has been consistently sleeping from 7:30pm-7am & was taking 2 naps each lasting 1-2hrs.

After transitioning her to 1 nap we’ve been struggling with her sleep. She will only sleep 1-1.5 hours. As soon as she wakes up, she stands up in her crib starts crying hysterically. I’ve tried letting her cry it out, and have also tried going in there to try to settle her back down, but if she see screams for milk. If I nurse her, she falls back asleep immediately & will sleep for another hour.

She has also been waking anywhere from 4am-5:30am consistently for around a month. I let her cry and watch her through the monitor, but she will not settle back down & gets super frustrated. The longest I let her cry is about 20 minutes. I typically end up going in there and hold her for a while. She basically begs for milk the entire time but sometimes I can get her to lay her head on my shoulder. If I nurse her, she eats 1/2 of one side & then she is good for me to lay her down (she doesn’t fall asleep on me, she’s just content with that much), she then sleep for 1-1.5 hours more.

Her current wake windows are 5.5 hrs, then 4.5

My daughter is 5.5 months old. At 5 months, we did modified Ferber with her (Taking Care of Babies’ ABCs of Sleep, to be precise). Previously, she had been using a Snoo for naps, She took 3 naps, and I would not cap naps.

On the first night of Taking Cara Babies, she cried for about 10 minutes and then went to sleep. She also had no difficulty falling asleep from that point on for naps during the day.

She sleeps 2/2.5/2.5/3. Naps are strictly 1.5, 1.5, and .5 daily (after consulting with Huckleberry and AI). I wake her up at 7 AM every morning, and goes to bed between 7 and 8 PM every night. Here’s the problem — she suffers from night wakings that seem to last forever — 2-3 hrs. She gets plenty of calories during the day, and we even began introducing solids (she seemed ready, independent of sleep concerns). She is frustrated during her night wakings, and in our attempt to figure out what is going on, we do a lot of checking on physical needs. What am I missing here? What am I overlooking? I’ll provide any other details needed. We first sleep trained on June 12 and while she does fall asleep initially independently, she usually suffers from one enormous waking per night.

My baby is 14 months now and we switched to one nap about 2 weeks ago. She had slept beautifully every single night and for naps. We switched because she started waking around 3-4 am crying, unable to settle and sleep through morning. She wasn’t fighting naps, so I stuck it out for a week to see if it was a phase, but it persisted. So we dropped to one nap and that solved the 3am wake ups, but now she is waking anywhere from 5-5:30am and sometimes cries for like 5 min in the night around 11-12, but she is able to go back to sleep. I leave her in her crib until 6am every morning to not reinforce the early wakes, but I’ve been doing this for about 2 weeks now and it’s not going away. Previously when the two naps were working, she would sleep until 6:15 with 2.5ish hours of daytime sleep no problem. She has also been struggling to nap for longer than 2 hours, so she ends up getting a lot more awake time than usual since we keep bedtime the same every day. I would just let her sleep into like 6:30 or 7 and cap her nap at 2 hours but she’s waking up so early that she’s exhausted by nap time. Is this just a phase? Anything I am doing wrong?

Here is some helpful info:

-sleep trained with TCAB since 5 months
-schedule: 5/6, 2.5 hours max of nap
-desired wake time would be 6am minimum
-bedtime 7:30 (bath, pajamas, book, to bed fully awake)
-our previous 2 nap schedule was 3/3/5 with a small 20-30 min cat nap in the morning and a longer 2ish hour nap
-11 hours total awake time, but recently has been more since she has been waking so early and not napping past 2 hours (which I know if already a long nap, not complaining, I just would let her sleep longer to help her get more rested)
-she wakes up crying every morning and from naps
-nursery is completely dark, blackout shades plus blackout curtain

My daughter is 5 months & almost 2 weeks, we started night training last Friday. She’s doing great!

We haven’t nap trained yet and she still uses a pacifier for those but not at night.

We are still stuck in basically all 30 minute naps. She has extended her first nap 1-2 times since we started- but mostly not, and the wake window is always pretty much the same , and she falls asleep in 10-12 mins usually. I’m just constantly given wake window advice and I honestly feel like sometimes it just makes the stress of it worse.

I feel like if it was wake windows you’d see some variances with the “short” naps but they are literally 30 mins in the nose every day

I know nights don’t always carry over to days, and I will probably need to nap train for independent naps too.

But just looking for advice and if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel with these short naps 😂 it makes managing the day so incredibly difficult and it’s so much effort and planning for such short increments of sleep.

I totally know it’s a phase, but it’s been mentally draining.

What were your experiences at this age? When did you see an improvement?

Would you consider just nap training now? And did you see an improvement.

I’m mentally exhausted from nap math. Lol

Here goes. I’ll try to be concise. Baby in question is 7 months and 1 week. Wakes at 7am-ish, bedtime is 8:30pm-ish, three naps a day, two hour long-ish and one shorter about 3 hours before bed. All of this is approximate as we haven’t been nearly as strict on schedules as with her brother.

First kiddo was a nightmare sleeper. Until sleep training, he would rarely string together more than 2 hours, except when we bought the SNOO, then we would get lucky and get maybe 3.5. Sleep trained at 7.5 months with CIO extinction and it was magic. Within two nights, 7-8 hours at a time and still sleeps like a champ at 2.5yrs old.

Here’s when I need help: Our second just turned 7 months. She was in the SNOO from the day we bought her home until 6 months old. Would wake maybe 2-3 times a night in the SNOO, sometimes only 1, rarely 4 but always miles better than her brother. I (dad) always get up with her because my wife starts work at 5:30am. We transitioned to the crib with pretty solid success. Same amount to wakes as Snoo: Sometimes 1, sometimes 3, rarely 4, but mostly 2. And each wake is pretty easy: I pick her up, sometimes she’s hungry, sometimes not, and she’s back asleep in 5-15minutes and back in the crib. She’s also an INCREDIBLY happy baby (hence my hesitation here). Her brother was not, likely due to lack of good sleep.

Anyway, my other problem is I feed her to sleep every night and I’m well aware CIO needs to be done awake.

So, if you were me, would you do CIO again with her in hopes it works its magic like it did with her brother and get a full night sleep or give it a few more weeks? She does occasionally also wake up and put herself back to sleep - so she CAN do it; just not regularly. I’m assuming I can’t sleep train in the middle of the night either: for example put her in her crib asleep and if she wakes up at say 1am, let her CIO then?

Another note is she naps in her crib always and dose excellent at that - but is always put down asleep.

With my son, I was a walking zombie. With her I’m tired. Really tired, because as everyone knows even with her only being up 15 minutes at a time at night, it takes a while for me to get back to sleep. But it’s manageable. With her brother I was losing my mind.

Ok, that was not concise at all. I’ll take any advice!

Thank you!!

A few sources say to limit naps to daytime 2 hours and wake baby up to feed. Are we doing this?

Currently LO feeds around every 3 hours, day and night (occasionally 4 hours at night).

We got back from a trip 3 days ago with a 2 hr time change ( Texas—> California ). He is also cutting his top front tooth. The first morning we got home he woke at 3:30 and I had to rock him to sleep and he slept till 6:30. 2nd night he woke at 1,3,5. I didn’t go in till 5 because the first two waking were not much crying. at 5 I had to rock him to sleep. Slept till 7:20. Now night 3 he was up every 1-2 hours. I only went in once at the beginning of the night to give him ibprophen for his teeth.

His day schedule is 2.75/3/3.25. Bed around 6:30/7.

What the heck is going on? Is it teething? He did not wake like this for his first two teeth and at this point it doesn’t seem like jet lag. I probably shouldn’t have gone in the first two nights I just felt bad because I figured it was jet lag

Toddler Girl
Age: 2 years 10 months
Sleep trained her with Taking Cara Babies at 8 months 28 days old in May 2024

Daughter has been sleeping extremely well in her crib in her room since we sleep trained her with TCB 2 years ago. 8:30 PM to 8:00 AM. Has never attempted to climb out.

Potty trained her at 2 years 4 months old in December 2025 and she caught on very fast in 2 weeks. She wears panties during the day and a diaper at night.

3 weeks ago she started pooping in her diaper overnight. She did this about 5 or 6 times. I started thinking maybe those hormones are coming and the night time training is about to start.

Purchased a rail to convert crib into a toddler bed. First 5 nights in the toddler bed went extremely well. Schedule and bedtime routine was kept the exact same. She never got out of her new toddler bed.

On the 6th njght, there was a thunderstorm and that’s when it changed. She got out of bed in the middle of the night very scared of the thunder. She got into bed with us.

On the 7th night, we laid her down in her bed as usual. She got up after we closed the door and came looking for us. Took about 6 times to get her to lay down.

On the 8th night, it took 7 times to get her to lay down.

Not only has she started to get out of bed after we lay her down, but she has also started to get out of bed in the middle of the night and join us each night as well.

So, we thought maybe she isn’t ready for a toddler bed and we put the crib back together. That was last night. Lots of screaming and crying upon laying her down. Maybe she also had some anxiety. I brought her into bed with us because she kept saying “mama I need you”. I heard this on the baby monitor and it just broke my heart.

At 4 AM, she was still in our bed, she woke up and said “mama I have to pee”. I carried her to her potty, she peed, then we went right back to sleep. So now I’m thinking sleep regression due to new hormone here that is waking her up to potty?? And that’s why she was pooping several weeks ago??

Anyway, I need help. I want her to sleep in her room in her bed. My husband and I both work in the office 40 hours a week. She also attends preschool 3 times a week. We all need sleep.

If she needs us to sleep, yes, we can co-sleep. We talked about it last night. She is our only child. We know it won’t be forever and I will admit I do love the cuddles. But, before I just give in to that……

How can I get her back in her room? Do I stick with the crib or go back to the toddler bed? I am sick to my stomach that I ruined our very amazing routine. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Confused,
A mom in Texas