Let’s be honest, this will not answer all your questions. But, these are my general guidelines for what you can expect for napping during the first 3-4 months of your baby’s life. The first guideline is don’t stress out, they will grow out of it. You can practice helpful sleep strategies during this stage, but this is not a time when you can do any actual sleep training. So use wake times as a guideline for when you can try to put your baby down for a nap, and give yourself freedom to make like Elsa and "let it go."
In the first 3 months of life (the 4th trimester), babies will typically take about 4-5 naps per day. The expectation is for average daily day sleep of 4-6 hours ; starting out closer to 6 hours and moving to 4 hours as they get older. The awake period (length of time you expect your baby awake between sleeps) you can expect your baby to tolerate starts around 1 hour at 1 month and increases by about 15 minutes each month and then to 2 hours around 4 months. Wake periods are a helpful tool to use in this time frame to make sure you’re avoiding an overtired baby, but you have the flexibility to adjust to different wake times each day and various nap lengths. Around 4 months, you may see a window open to move your baby to 3 naps a day. A “typical” three nap/day schedule based on wake windows is something like: a morning nap, an afternoon nap and then a shorter evening nap (often timed around 4-5 pm), followed about 1-2 hours after waking, with bedtime. As your baby gets older, you may see that they tolerate a longer wake window in the morning and that this shortens as the day progresses. Eventually you will see that the timing of the naps tends to fall around the same times each day and you can start putting your baby down at specific times. Enter the nap prison portion of your parenting... A note about the infamous "Cat" nap…. In this early stage, babies may also take very lovely (sarcasm implied) “cat naps” where they sleep for 15-30 minutes at a time, as often as every hour. As a parent adjusting to life with a newborn, these can be very frustrating and make you feel like you aren’t going to ever have control over your life again. And, while you won’t ever have control over your life again, you will be able to gain some control over your schedule once your baby is a little older. I remember being told how normal these cat naps were, and wanting to cause harm to the person who told me that, as she laughed it off as just another thing a new mom had to get used to. Now, while it is annoying, you don’t have to get used to it because it will go away. Use this window in your baby’s early life to get out and celebrate not being tied down by naptime. That will come soon enough. If you have a cat napper, I am sorry, but do what I did not do and avoid spending endless hours trying to change that. It will change, but not because of anything you really do in those first couple of months. If you have questions about things you can be trying to “practice” during this time to get you on track to sleep training once they are old enough, or just any questions about what all of this means, please don’t hesitate to reach out! You do not have to sort through all of the information out there alone. I already did that for you!
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This is the face of a mom who remembered Target's drive-up pick-up service this morning. She needed to work AND run errands during her 2 hr 45 minute "free block" and could not figure out how to get a hand soap refill and cotton balls (both Target specific) without getting sucked into a Target warp. She *may* have gotten on the app to have them delivered and then saw the drive-up option. In less time than it would have taken for her to walk into and out of the store, she had her items and was driving away. Having saved her family about 700% of the purchase price of the two items by avoiding entering the store...
This has me thinking about something I've been pondering a lot lately. Why is it that we have such a hard time asking for help as parents? There are 100,000+ resources out there, and they are often conflicting, but we still feel like we should find the one right answer for us in all that noise. The more parents I talk to, the more I see this theme. Wishing they had asked for help sooner, but feeling like they should have known what to do. They spend so much time going down the rabbit hole of googling and information, only to come out more confused and frazzled. And, now, I think our expectation that we can figure it all out has something to do with amazing things like drive-up pick-up at Target. Our lives have become so busy, that we can't even find time to go get hand soap (and during cold and flu season no less)! We expect to find immediate answers and that we will be able to manifest a solution. We're so used to finding an app or an article (or a blog post...) to solve our problem that we forget sometimes we actually need another person to help us. We forget that it's OKAY to need people, not just answers. And we have transferred this to parenting. Raising children is meant to be done in community. And not just with play dates and preschool outings, but with the hard parts. The (lack of) sleeping, feeding challenges and postpartum issues. It's ok to feel like you don't know what you're doing, you've never had this baby before! So, take a deep breath, give yourself a break and call a friend or acquaintance to come clean your kitchen and hold your baby while you take a nap. Then, have them run thru the Target drive-up for you. Winning. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
June 2020
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