Now that Baby Jumper is a year old (eek! How did that happen so quickly?!), we’ve been looking back on the last year of our life. The first thing we did was pat ourselves on the back — hooray! we did it!! — but we also reflected on the things we’ve done and what we could have improved on. Being a parent doesn’t come with a handbook. There’s a lot of advice out there, but our philosophy was to take it with a grain of salt. Not all of the advice necessarily applied to us, and we really did want to learn on our own. We both agreed, though, that we really could have improved on getting Chloe to have better sleep habits because we didn’t have a set nap time or bed time, and followed Chloe’s cues.
Chloe is a year old now, and I still can’t count on her to take a nap every day. She’ll cat nap every once in awhile. Maybe she’ll doze off for twenty minutes or so, but it’s not long enough for me to get any real housework done. There are days when she won’t nap at all, and she’s never once napped in her own crib. She sleeps there wonderfully through the night (most nights!), but screams and cries if we put her in her crib for a nap. So, how did we get here? And what could we have done differently?
- I couldn’t lift the baby in and out of her crib (at first). I had a c-section, and it was hard for me to get in and out of our bed. I slept on the couch out of necessity for the first four weeks or so, but continued to sleep on the couch until she was 12 weeks old (when we transitioned her to her crib). I’m short and we don’t have a drop-side crib, so letting her sleep in the crib (at first) was off the table. I quickly got into a routine of nursing her or giving her a bottle, rocking her to sleep, and letting her sleep in the bassinet beside me.
ADVERTISEMENT - Everyone wanted to hold her, and I mean everyone and all the time. I didn’t think it was possible to spoil a baby, but boy did she get used to this sleeping arrangement pretty quickly! It may have been sweet to see grandma holding Chloe during the day, but at 3am when she was shrieking and absolutely refused to lay in her Rock n Play, we were beyond exhausted and miserable and wishing that maybe we hadn’t let someone hold her all afternoon while she slept. It would take at least two days for Chloe to adjust to sleeping without being held. This happened enough times that we finally set the rule “if she’s sleeping, do not touch her!!” because it truly was that hard for us in the middle of the night!
- I got lazy. Chloe has always been a bad napper, so if she finally took one I didn’t want to do ANYTHING to disturb her. I tried gently picking her up and putting her in her crib a few times, but each time she’d wake right up and scream until she turned red. It never mattered how deep of a sleep she was in. The second her head hit the mattress, she was up and screaming. This was so terribly stressful and wasn’t a fight I wanted to fight. I figured she needed her sleep, period, more than she needed to sleep in her crib… so I just let her sleep wherever she fell asleep.
- Poor daytime napping means late nights. Chloe gets exhausted to the point where she can’t even walk straight. I have never seen a person fight sleep as much as she does! She’ll yawn, rub her eyes, snuggle up with a bottle and ten seconds later she’s caught a second wind and is up and running around again! We start our bedtime routine around 8pm and we’re lucky if she’s asleep by 9:30. Most nights, she’s up until 10pm. She’ll sleep until 7:30am, but has restless nights if she’s teething (like right now), so everyone in our household is downright exhausted.
Her poor daytime sleep habits have been really stressful for me. Oftentimes, she would fall asleep in my bed (and I couldn’t leave her) or beside me on the couch (so I still couldn’t leave her side), that it meant I was neglecting things like housework or catching up on emails. I’ve talked to our pediatrician at length about this, and she has never seemed worried about Chloe’s sleep habits. As long as Chloe is getting adequate rest and is physically healthy and developmentally on track, she said, then there isn’t anything to worry about.
Still we wish that we’d have established better sleep routines for her instead of being so go-with-the-flow. She’s a wild one and certainly has a mind of her own, and when she catches a second wind watch out!!
Does your child have poor sleep habits? How do you cope?
kiwi / 691 posts
This could not be more relevant to me! My LO is 10 months and is a terrible napper. I got into the habit during maternity leave of letting her fall asleep on me for naps. She was so warm and snuggly! Big mistake. She finally (sort of) broke the habit when she started daycare, but I lost my job a couple weeks ago so I’ve been home with her all day and we’ve fallen into our old pattern of naps on mom! I’ve recently noticed that her sleeping at night is starting to get really bad, even though she’s never had trouble sleeping in her crib at bedtime, and I’m wondering if it’s related to the napping regression. Ugh! Thank you for letting me vent and letting me know I’m not the only one who has napping issues!
pomegranate / 3383 posts
Wow! I think Chloe goes to bed later than I do some nights!
I’ve been so diligent in teaching good sleep habits and maintaining a nap schedule/routine…but to the point where I think most of my family and friends think I’m crazy neurotic and way too strict about naps and bedtime. My LO is a total crank if he doesn’t get his sleep though. If he was happy-go-lucky without his naps and less nighttime sleep then I wouldn’t worry so much…
coffee bean / 41 posts
This was totally our life before we sleep trained. All of us were exhausted! So I definitely feel your pain.
pea / 15 posts
This was pretty much the situation for us until my little guy was about 6 months old. He would only nap when held, and he was bed-sharing with us because he refused to sleep in the crib.
Around 5-6 months we did CIO and while it was sooo tough for those first few days, he was sleeping in his crib alone within a week. Getting him sleeping through the night took longer. But now we’re getting 12 hours or so every night and 1 nap in the middle of the day with no crying. He curls up with his stuffed polar bear and goes right to sleep.
blogger / persimmon / 1220 posts
Aliya actually has a great daytime nap schedule (it was in one of my earlier posts this week), but she still sleeps late at night. Like you, we start her bedtime routine around 7:50 or 8ish, and she takes forever to wind down. On a good night, she’ll fall asleep by 9 PM (even though we put her down around 8:15), and last night she was still babbling away until 9:30 PM. I think when I transition her to 1 nap she’ll do better (her 2nd nap is pretty late).
Hope things get better for you mama!
guest
@Sammyfab: I so hear you! I was very militant about sleep at first, because we saw that our LO was not having an easy time of it. But friends and family thought I was crazy… there were even times when people would come to visit and if I said, “Oh, it’s time for baby’s nap,” they’d brush me off and tell me that that one missed nap was not the end of the world. It got pretty bad, but finally, I put my foot down and said enough was enough, and from then on out I didn’t care if people thought I was loony. Sleep is so important for growing babies!
persimmon / 1472 posts
@Sammyfab: I’m right there with you! LO is super crank if she misses a nap so I always make sure she has a place to nap if we are out. Lately that’s in the Ergo carrier (thank god she finally can nap in it!) but I think my friends think I’m too strict. I get comments that I spoil her (by letting her sleep when she wants? Yea try explaining that to me) or she needs to adjust. But I feel her sleep is very important for her development so I just trudge on. If LO was not a crankypants without a nap here and there, i wouldn’t be as crazy I guess. We do what we need to do!
hostess / papaya / 10540 posts
I can relate to everything you posted in your first point, it was exactly the same for me.
We night trained around 6 months, I think? Now I forget, oops! And nap trained around 11 months? I don’t know that night time could have been done any sooner, but I wish we had done naps sooner. It was all rough at first, but having a good sleeper and getting a personal break is a real life changer!
guest
I think my family finds it crazy how much I guard my son’s sleep. He’s two now, and I’m far more flexible than I was. But he was a bear about sleep — fought going down, wouldn’t stay asleep with ANY noise/movement, couldn’t sleep alone — and I couldn’t stand the rest of my day if he skipped his nap. He just turned into a scary woodland creature that shrieked into my ear as I carried him around the rest of the day, and I wasn’t allowed to put him down. (I know, it sounds like he’s the boss or something, and he wasn’t. But it got to me more than I let him know.) Anyway, I had good reason for being the crazy with the sign on the door about nobody ringing her doorbell. And now, finally, at two, he goes down easy, sleeps through all kinds of noises, and naps ALONE. Whew.
My point: some of this stuff is developmental. Especially sleep. I could actually watch my son decide to stay awake. So frustrating. Cuddle them if and when you can, though. The sleep thing happens without your coaching.
But Chloe, and every other baby out there, will make a choice at some stage that she WANTS to sleep. And after that, watch out. You’ll have a good sleeper on your hands, regardless of the choices you’ve made so far.
guest
I had a harder time getting my oldest down for naps, but once you do it you wonder why you didn’t do it before. So freeing! Just do a simplified version of your bedtime routine. With us that meant books but no bathtime. Obviously tell her in advance what’s going to happen, and then if she were to get upset you can sit in there with her while she falls asleep. The crazy part is when they go from 2 naps (morning and afternoon) to one nap. Sometimes it’s hard to gauge when naptime should be. This site has a lot of tips on nap schedules for toddlers http://www.toddler-tips-and-tricks.com/nap-schedule.html but still every child is very much an individual.