What has helped Addie nap better, courtesy of Dr Weissbluth

So here is a brief summary of where we were and what got us to where we are. 

Addie did not nap.  She "passed out" for 25 minutes at a time, about twice a day.  So we read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child and did the following steps based on instructions from the book....

• Wake up Addie at 7 am.  This helps establish some regularity and gets her close to a schedule that works with baby's natural nap times, 9 am and 1 pm.
• Make the room bright and full of sunshine.  This helps baby set this on her internal clock as "awake" time, thus helping her realize it's different than sleep time.
• Put her down for first nap within one to two hours of wake up time.  In the beginning, she seemed to need to go down within an hour of getting up.  I suspect this was because of being overly tired and needing to catch up on rest.  Now it's closer to two hours.  
• When deciding when to put her down I watched her sleep signals more than the clock.  The clock gave me a rough idea of when she might be tired, but then I watched her.  She gets quiet, moves less, and sucks her fingers when she begins to get tired.  The next stage includes being agitated, especially when I walk away from her.  She also may start to get noisy again, in a sort of yelling way.  If I miss all these signs she gets sort of frantic, moving about a lot and getting a nervous but smiley laugh / cry thing going.  Poor baby.
• Put her down for her second nap within two to three hours of waking for the first one.  This is almost always within two hours for her.  
• Before all naps I nurse her and swaddle her legs and put a light sleep sack on over her.  I do the sack partly for warmth but also in case she gets herself unswaddled-- then the swaddle is caught in the sack and not out for her to wrap around her head.  
• Put her down for an optional third nap around 4:30 - 5:30-ish.  This carries her through until bedtime at 8pm (or so I think-- we are still trying to sort this out).
• The entire while I  keep a sleep log to help figure out what works for her.  

The thing that's missing from the Weissbluth method is crying.  I will let her fuss for up to 10 minutes.  Dr Weissbluth would say to let her cry for up to an hour at nap time and then indefinitely at bedtime.  I've found that when we got her to bed before she was overtired though, there isn't much crying.  So when she just doesn't go down I let her cry for ten minutes.  If she's not asleep after that we just get her up and keep her awake until the next nap time, or a little earlier.  Those are anxious times for me because I worry we'll get back into that overtired, no nap cycle.  So far, missing one nap hasn't been a permanent problem.  She always seems to start new with the next nap and the rest of the day goes well.


To summarize, the key for us was to, especially at first, get her in bed at the beginning of her sleepy signals.  That seemed to result in the least amount of protest.  It was counter-intuitive to me because I used to think the more tired she was the easier she would go down-- but it's quite the opposite, just like Dr Weissbluth explains.