Schedule? What schedule?

[ginadc]

DD is 5.5 months old and I keep getting variations on this question: "When is Annika's nap time?" Yesterday, someone wanted to do a conference call with me and kept asking when Annika would be napping. My best answer was: "It all depends."

Am I the only one whose baby doesn't have a predictable nap time? I've been following the Weissbluth "wakefulness window" of 2 hours, which seems to work very well. When she's been up a little less than 2 hours, I start putting her down for a nap, either in her swing or in her crib (usually her swing as she sleeps longer and sounder there, and it's right here in my office where I can see her). She goes down pretty well, usually. But the length of her naps varies. Some days she'll sleep a good solid 2 hours, others--half an hour, tops.

So I can't say on Tuesday that she'll be napping at 10:30 am on Wednesday. She might be. Usually she wakes up at around 6:30 or 7 am, and so she'll likely go down for a nap around 9. She might still be asleep at 10:30, or she might have gotten up an hour earlier, absolutely wide awake. She will nap sometime mid-morning and sometime midafternoon, but it's hard to pin down more precisely than that.

The woman I was talking to yesterday (our social worker for DD's adoption, actually) kept trying to pin me down and I was starting to feel like something was wrong with me for not being able to say, "Yes, Annika will be napping at x time tomorrow." And I finally said okay, she'll probably be napping around 2 pm--and of course the social worker called at 2 pm today and she wasn't, because she'd literally woken up 15 minutes after her first morning nap ended and that completely threw all timing out the window.

This mostly seems to work for us (although it makes my days rather unpredictable). I suppose it would be easier for me if I knew she would nap from 10 to 11:30 and 2 to 3:30, but it doesn't seem particularly realistic. When she does wake up "early" from a nap, it's usually nigh on impossible to get her back to sleep and it doesn't make sense to me to get her crazy-upset trying to do that.

So...am I weird? Does everybody else have regular naptimes?

[Sal03]

DD is almost 4 months and is on no schedule. it all depends on what time she wakes up and we also use the 2 hour rule so her naps work around that. And like you, sometimes they are 30 minutes, and sometimes 3 hours! If I recall correctly, DS did not settle into a more predictable nap routine until about 6.5 months. So hopefully it will be soon for you!

[goldengbridge]

My DS didn't have a predictable routine until around 8 months. Hang in there. It will happen!

[J&K2003]

Reading your post makes me feel better. :) DD is also 5.5 mos old, and her naps are not at predictable times either. We know about how many naps per day she takes, but the times vary wildly. They last from 30 mins to almost 2 hours too! There's just no way to know. We also have the Weissbluth book, and I'm still waiting for the morning and afternoon nap to form! HTH! :)

[Sandie78]

Oh my gosh, I got soooo sick of people asking me if DS was on a schedule yet. DS didn't fall into a regular routine until about 7 or 8 months old (and it's still fairly flexible) and that was fine with me, but it seemed to bother other people.

[twinnyme]

DD is 18 months and still on no true schedule. She is in daycare and naps only once a day there (12-2:30) so I try to stick with that at home, but it depends on when she wakes up (varies widely between 5 and 7), and many other things. She has NEVER ever been a predictable napper. I can *kind of* count on it now, but that is a relatively new development - maybe the last two months - which is tough for me also on the days I WAH. But she will still sometimes even take two naps a day, sometimes just one 1-hour one, sometimes a 3-hour one, but mostly a 2 to 2.5-hour one. Sorry I can't be more helpful. I've actually worked at (since she was about a year; before that I just went with her flow) trying to get her on a more predictable schedule *because* I WAH on a regular basis, but she's just not very easy to predict when it comes to sleeping!

[NYN]

my DD did not have a strict schedule until 8 months and like you, i just kind of followed her lead. then one glorious day she just figured out that she liked to nap at this time, this time and this time and she liked to go to bed at 7pm and she started putting herself to sleep at those times. now that she is in the process of consolodating her naps it has become a little more unpredictable again. i really don't care as long as she gets all the sleep she needs in one 24 hour period.

[tunibell]

Oh, same boat here, all the way. My DD is 4.5 mo, and her naps are all over the place. Sometimes she naps for 18 minutes, sometimes its 2.5 hours. Total crapshoot.

[ginadc]

Whew! Good to hear I'm not the only one (or DD's not). Like you said, Sandie, it doesn't really bother me that much, but it does seem to bother other people. If the woman the other day hadn't been our social worker, I would have finally said, "What part of SHE DOESN'T HAVE A SET NAPTIME don't you understand?" ;)

[kat]

Nope, they're five months old and nothing even close to a set schedule. Except that DS wakes up almost exactly at the 35-40 minute mark for his naps (but not at night). Sometimes he'll go back to sleep, other times he won't. But like you, I try to follow the 2 hour window and then the actual nap time varies from baby to baby and from day to day....so the times are never consistent.

[newyorkgirl]

Some babies follow a schedule, and some babies don't. But that doesn't mean that babies aren't predictable. I think that around that time, DS would follow the two-hour rule more so than the naps-at-9-and-1 rule. So his naps were all over the place too, but he was predictable. He would always need a nap exactly two hours after he woke up.

[malala]

Another one on the same boat here.

DD is 6.5 months old, and she's up for the day sometime between 7-8 am.
She takes 2 or 3 naps depending on the day, and they last anywhere between 45 min to 2 hs. Mostly 1.5/2 hs.

I never know when I'll be able to do anything, but that's fine by me, I just want DD to get her rest.
She has a lifetime ahead of her full of schedules to follow, I'll let her be a baby for now;)

[sophonisba9]

No schedules here for my almost 6 month old DS. Sometimes I can get him to nap for 40 minutes, on my lap, with my boob in his mouth. That nap sometimes happens in the late morning and late afternoon. If things are really bad then we take a drive and do a circut of the local freeways around noon.

[heidi0622]

Echoing everyone else - my 4-mo old DS isn't on a set schedule either.

He does follow the 2 hour window pretty well, but nap lengths are all over the place. So glad to hear I'm not the only one!

[DianeCourt]

Don't stress! DD is 8.5 months old and just now am I starting to see a daily schedule. Some babies never get on one, though, and that's OK. I used to stress about that, too.

[EJH]

DD is almost 11 months old and has no schedule other than the one she gave herself.

On days that we're home, (Sat, Sun, Mon), she likes to take a nap 2 hours after she wakes up. She's down for between 1.5 and 3 hours, depending on the day. Sometimes she'll take an afternoon nap, around 2pm, sometimes she'll take one around 4, it all depends.

We've given up when she's at daycare. We're happy if she gets some sleep during the day. If my ILs take her back to their factory (next door to daycare) she will sleep for a good couple of hours, but that's not guaranteed.

She goes down for the night between 8 and 9, and that was following the lead of what she wanted. It was like clockwork starting around 3 or 4 months old. She'd demand to nurse at 8 and be out within seconds.

I'm glad this is how we decided to parent. She's flexible, if she misses her regularly scheduled morning nap because we have somewhere to be, she'll make up for it with shorter naps throughout the day.

Erin

[Daniel's Kitty]

Ds is almost 11 months and will only take good naps if he can cuddle with mom. Our schedule has gone out the window since he is trying to drop his second nap.

[Kate&Joey]

DS is six months and we follow the 2-hour window schedule, too. Naps vary in length. We keep it flexible!

What drove me crazy was people asking me if DS was on a schedule as early as 8 WEEKS...what kind of children did these people have that they put newborns on a schedule? I would get so tired of people asking me this. :rolleyes: I felt like I was somehow an inadquate mother because DS didn't spring from the womb with an hour-by-hour checklist!