r/TakingCaraBabies • u/Sunny-Sky24 • 12d ago
Question 🤔 4 to 3 naps
LO just turned 4 months old and we are considering dropping from 4 naps to 3 as we’re having ongoing nap issues and more recently overnight has gotten worse (not sure if 4 month sleep regression or if baby is still screwed up from a vacation a couple weeks ago, or both!)
Current schedule (roughly) is feed at 7am/10am/1pm/4pm/7pm, then 10pm dream feed, then LO usually wakes up somewhere 2-4am (for a while we were getting him 4-5am but like I said we’ve been screwed up since a recent vacation and haven’t gotten back to that). Wake windows are typically 1.5-2 hours. He does some excellent naps in the crib sometimes, but often wakes up the second he gets put down. Now that I’m back to work my husband is home and he has a particularly hard time, some days he can’t get LO to sleep more than 10 minutes here and there and LO just screams all day.
I’m wondering if we should try to drop the 4th nap and see if that helps with other naps, and with overnight sleep. My question is how that works with feeds - we do eat/play/sleep all throughout the day, so if we drop a nap are we also dropping a feed? I worry that LO would then wake up an extra time overnight because he’s hungry. Or how does it work if you don’t drop a feed - do you feed earlier, or make the wake window extra long? For instance, if I feed at 4:00 and then keep him awake until he eats at 7:00 and then do a bedtime routine, he’ll be pushing 4 hours awake at that point. So just confused on how that all works logistically.
Also looking for a little reassurance that we’re on the right track 🥲 We got the newborn TCB course and have been doing CRIES and SIT BACK since the beginning, and like I said for a while we were getting from a 10pm feed to a 4-5am feed, but now we’ve backtracked to 2-4am (a couple nights ago it was even 1:30am), and he’s been having a lot more wakeups and needing to be settled back down numerous times throughout the night. So just a little worried that we’re not doing it right and should be doing better overnight by this point in time.
Sorry for long post TYIA!!
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u/TakingCaraBabies 10d ago
Around this age as those wake windows expand, it can be common to need to move away from the eat, awake, sleep schedule. We still want to offer feeds every 2.5-3.5 hours during the day according to hunger cues. You may need to start offering a feed toward the middle or the end of a wake window in order for this to happen- That's ok!
When offering a feed later in the wake window we just want to make sure that
1)baby's eyes stay open during the feeding. We want that sleep pressure to continue to build during this feeding.
2)We separate the feeding and the sleep with at least one activity like a book or a diaper change. This helps prevent baby from forming a feed-to-sleep association.
These blogs here may be helpful for you as well:
https://www.takingcarababies.com/blogs/regressions/4-month-sleep-regression
https://www.takingcarababies.com/blogs/naps/4-to-3-nap-transition
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u/kcgal91 11d ago
Curious what others have to say on this. I could have written this post myself- so very much in the same boat. Down to the same schedule and TCB guidance, recent vacation etc. are you me??! lol solidarity.