sleep/nap questions!?

Hi - well I now have a baby that sleeps throught the night and self settles at night, however still some problems.
- does not self settle during day naps, needs to be rocked, although this is quite an easy process..but would still like him to self settle - he's getting to heavy!
- day naps are only 30mins long and 3 - 4 of these a day. I try to resettle when he wakes at 30mins with no luck. He is still tired when he wakes though.
- his night sleep I put him down between 7 and 8 pm (self settles) but he tends to wake again about an hour or so later. The last couple of nights I have given him a feed and he goes straight back to sleep, tonight I have just gone in and resettled him by playing his music and he is back asleep.
I wonder if his waking an hour after he goes to bed at night is hunger? I think my breast milk at night is not as good, although during the day I seem to have a lot of milk?? During the night I hear him wake and self settle and I dont go in to him.
He is 18 weeks this weekend, so keen to hear how other babies sleep is at this time, I know babies are all different, however 30min naps seems quite short - esp when he wakes tired still....

Like Jaxnz1 said capnapping is very common. My son was a great sleeper until 5 weeks old then it all went down hill. He would only sleep for 45mins at a time no matter what I tried. He eventually outgrew it around 6-7mths and now sleeps 1.5hrs morning and afternoon. Sorry that's not much help to you!

Have a look at this website. It might offer some ideas you haven't already tried.

I had the same thing for a while , and yes they do grow out of it, but what I think helped was giving them the chance to resettle themselves. I used to give my girl 5 minutes to go back to sleep. Its kind of a shorten version of cry it out, and during the day I would just try it once or twice. At night or bed time as long as it took for her to go to sleep.
I would tend to go with the flow until they are around 6 or so months too, but unless your babe is obviously ditressed maybe give him the chance to settle down and go back to sleep
Make sure the room is dark, maybe try some white noise or a mobile - voice activated or remote ones are great so you dont have to go back in there
you probably no all that bit though

At that age my DD would often wake from naps still tired, and I used to take her out in the stroller for a short walk to 'top up' her nap. She'd wake much happier.

Hi, Bizzy it's normal for a baby your age to need to be up for just 1hr but as they get older, they need to be up a lot longer than that. The difference between 3mths old and 4mths old is quite a bit! My baby needed 1.5hrs up, and now he's up for 2hrs sometimes a bit longer. But that usually affects your battling to get them to sleep and it doesn't sound like you have any trouble with that.

What you are having trouble with is getting your baby into the next sleep cycle during the day to avoid the catnaps. My baby has always been a good sleeper during the day: 1.5hrs in the morning, 2hrs in the afternoon and another nap at some point. But this hasn't always been easy because I've had to resettle him into his next sleep cycle. When he was younger, that meant dummy in or rocking around that time to get him into the next sleep cycle. Nowadays I do the Sleep Sense Programme, and he is starting to go into the next sleep cycle himself. Not always successfully, but we are fairly new to it and it really is the last thing he is having to master. He too used to wake up not just once but began to frequently wake up in the evening (5mths old they start to wake up completely from sleep cycles so their sleeping gets worse around this time). When I started the Sleep Sense programme, that stopped and he now sleeps soundly at night.

Mrs_B wrote: Like Jaxnz1 said capnapping is very common. My son was a great sleeper until 5 weeks old then it all went down hill. He would only sleep for 45mins at a time no matter what I tried. He eventually outgrew it around 6-7mths and now sleeps 1.5hrs morning and afternoon. Sorry that's not much help to you! Have a look at this website. It might offer some ideas you haven't already tried.

So pleased to hear that around 6-7 months things might change as we're exactly the same. From about 5 or 6 weeks he's been catnapping 25-45 mins at a time and only sleeps longer if I go in and bounce the hammock for 20-40 mins. Lucky my Oh Baby mag arrived this week so I just read that while rocking the hammock