Since I wrote my last post on this topic, our napping situation has made a complete turnaround. From birth, until about a two months ago, Will was nearly exclusively napping in his swing. He did great there, until he didn't anymore. His swing naps kept deteriorating until the point came when I decided to get him out of the swing, once and for all, and into his crib.This whole endeavor started when he had just turned four months old. I read an article describing how to get your kids to nap well, and in the appropriate place. It gave a lot of different options for how to accomplish this, but they all boiled down to letting them cry it out, until they finally slept. The article described something called a 'nap hour,' where you essentially leave your child in their crib for an hour, sleeping or crying regardless. Supposedly this would teach them to sleep for an appropriate amount of time. The article said that most kids didn't end up crying for very long, but that some would start out crying for the whole hour, but that this would gradually decrease until there was no crying. It said to give this method about a week before trying something else.
So desperate was I to get him out of his swing and into the crib, that I decided to give this method a shot. I started a new pre-nap routine, similar to our pre-bed routine. Then I fed him and put him in his crib, drowsy. The first day he cried for the whole hour, during each of his four naps. It was the most awful day ever. Not only did he not get much sleep, but he had to cry for so long. The next day, I reluctantly tried it again, and only made it through two of the four naps with this method. He was not getting any better, and I could not stand to listen to him cry any more. I decided that he clearly just wasn't ready for the crib yet. So the swing naps continued for two more weeks.
Two weeks later, I decided to try a new method instead. Recalling how during some of our walks, whenever he would wear a hat that was a little too big for him, the hat would slip over his eyes. He would be under his car seat canopy, so I often didn't notice right away that this had happened. On more than one occasion, the hat over his eyes had made his eyes close long enough, that he would simply give up and fall asleep. I thought that something similar could work in his crib (of course making sure the hat could not slide over his nose). I also decided to go back to swaddling him, but only during naps, not at night (before this he would nap in the swing with a blanket tucked around his waist).The first nap went just ok. He resisted the swaddling and hated the hat. Once he was wrapped tight and capped, he arched his back and wiggled and whined, and even cried a little, for about 10 minutes. Just as I was about to go in there and admit defeat, he fell asleep! This was the first day that I had ever gotten him to successfully nap in his crib. I felt on top of the world . . . until he awoke only 30 minutes later. I then decided that I would try this method for only one nap a day, while the rest of them were swing naps. That way, even if the crib naps were too short, I knew he could sleep long enough in the swing to make up for it.
Slowly, over a period of about a couple of weeks, his crib naps started getting longer and he would go down without much of a fight. By the time he was five months old, nearly all of his naps were in the crib. He was still doing 4 naps a day at that point, and it was only his final nap (a short cat nap that he usually fought tooth and nail) that was in the swing. By five and a half months, I decided to start seeing if he could sleep without the swaddle altogether (by this time he was down to three naps a day). I had long since abandoned the hat, so I thought he might be ready. What I did was to lay the SwaddleMe blanket (shown here) stretched out in the crib. After I fed him and he became drowsy, I would then put him in the crib, on top of the SwaddleMe, in position to be swaddled if he had to be. In the beginning, he would then immediately wake up as I laid him down, and start thrashing and whining. At that point I would swaddle him and leave the room. He would usually whine for less than 30 seconds before falling asleep for an hour. Slowly, surely by surely, what he started doing (not every day, but with steadily increasing occurrence) was to roll over and go to sleep when I placed him on top of the swaddle. Then I would just leave and let him sleep.
Now he has been doing that for nearly every nap lately. He just turned six months old, and it took me two months, but he is finally sleeping as well in his crib, during the day, as he does at night. Most of his naps are exactly an hour long, but he still does an occasional short nap of only thirty minutes. Yesterday though, he slept for two and a half hours! A new crib record! My ultimate plan is that once he can go a week without needing to be swaddled, I will take the swaddle out completely. Every now and again, he will fight the last nap of the day, and I put him in the swing, mostly for time reasons. His bed time is seven pm and if his last nap ends later than four thirty pm, he will fight going to bed. So usually I will try to put him down for his last nap at three thirty. If he fights it for half an hour or more, he won't get enough sleep, and will be cranky. Therefore, if he is in a fighting kind of mood, I will just put him in the swing. This happens less than a couple of times a week at this point. This has all happened not a second too soon too, as his little (or not so little anymore) feet are getting close to hanging off the edge of the swing.
Comments
Post a Comment