My oldest has always been eat sleep eat play eat sleep eat. The younger one can do a bit less eating and is generally lower maintenance.
For the adjusting… can you outsource some of that to your partner so he makes you a looking ahead graphic or note about what changes to expect next month?
How old is Ravi at this point?
Around 5 months we moved our child to a “by the clock” schedule, with feedings every 2 1/2 - 3 hours. So - sometimes it would look like eat play eat sleep play eat play sleep, depending on how the hours break out. It did mean we had longer naps and shorter naps, more sleep days and less sleep days, but it made it much easier for when we had other caregivers (I.e my parents) who for some reason could not keep track of wake windows.
Also helped our sanity a bit.
I did this too. I felt like play then sleep is too hard of a switch (I still find this to be true for the toddlers). I never actually fed them to sleep though, I would just feed them to sleepiness and then put them down awake. But I know moms who couldn’t do that either because their kiddos would conk out. It’s very kid dependent and there’s no harm trying a few things.
I forget how old Ravi is now, but are you considering consolidating to two naps per day yet or have you already done that?
He’s four months old and he’s still taking 4 naps. I think we could get it down to 3 before daycare but I’m also struggling to understand how that happens if I have to wake him to eat every 3 hours. But also he doesn’t often nap longer than 45 minutes…I didn’t like our last pediatrician—she just said, about nap consolidating, “it’ll happen”
Yeah we’re doing something similar; he’s woken to eat if it’s at the 3 hour mark, but he often wakes up around the 2.5 hour mark. Note—he doesn’t sleep 2.5-3 hours because his wake window is about 1:45 right now and he currently eats right when he wakes up. So he’s going down for a nap about 1:30 after eating.
Alright I just read the TCB blog posts about time to drop a nap and how to drop a nap. Even though his naps are short, I don’t think he’s ready to drop one yet—he doesn’t have any of the other signs that it’s time. Idk!!!
Are you waking him to eat? I thought he was just waking on his own?
Waking him to eat if it’s been 3 hours since he last ate. But usually he is waking on his own around the 2.5 hour mark
OK. This morning I fed Ravi 30 min before nap and he slept an hour. But sample size of one is inconclusive. I was wondering if he assumed he’d be fed immediately after the nap, if that pattern or association was there, but that hasn’t been a thing! So he’s more flexible than my anxiety assumes 
Good golly I need to get a grip, I can’t ruminate this much about every change!!
So, I feed my 7 month old like 7 times a day maybe? A ton of times for a baby this old. We usually do feed her before a nap. At least I almost always do. Sometimes she falls asleep nursing, sometimes not. She sleeps through the night (with dream feed) and takes great naps, so frequent feeding and sometimes nursing to sleep is obviously not always a death knell for independent sleep.
Something we try to do if she’s not crazy tired is feed first, then read a book, then put to bed. So we are feeding right before sleep but also not feeding to sleep, if that makes sense? Would that be something that might work for you?
I’m glad you got a good nap this morning! You have really been through the wringer on baby sleep!
I know you’ve got a good sleeper on your hands so maybe irrelevant, but can you remember how you dropped naps? It’s so mysterious to me.
Perhaps my lesson here should be to be less uptight about a certain eat sleep play whatever
Umm, I have done this by never quite understanding how to manage a schedule of more than two naps and also having older children? LB never got more than one scheduled nap and the others were catch as catch can (car and carrier naps). With BB I didn’t really understand about scheduling naps and eventually it just sort of coalesced into a two-nap and then one-nap schedule.
The cuckoo usually only takes 2 “real” naps, which is not many for her age. But something I read was that the third nap can be a crappy little nap- the example was in the car on the way home from daycare- and I am a big fan of the crappy little nap as an extender. For us it isn’t always the last nap. Sometimes it’s mid-day while running errands and then the second nap doesn’t start until closer to 3. Or if she was up early that morning and everything is shifted early, then maybe we do a crib nap around 5-5:30 and she still goes to bed at like 7:30.
So my three suggestions are:
-embrace the crappy little nap as a first step toward dropping a nap
-the number of naps does not have to be the same every day necessarily
-trust yourself and your baby to figure it out
Yes this!
My mom and I were talking about my niece yesterday. She went back to work and my BIL (my niece’s stepdad, who is a SAHD and will be doing a lot of baby care) and sister can’t get baby to take a bottle. Anyway, my mom’s worry is that because my sister is such a dominant personality and also a legit Doctor of Nursing for babies, she might steamroll over the baby’s mother.
So my mom wants FTMs like you and my niece to know that you are the expert on your own particular baby. Other people might be experts on Babies, writ large, but no one knows Ravi like you do.
lol naps today have been wild
1: fed before, 1 hour long
2: didn’t feed before, 30 min long
3: fed before, 2 hours long (the max I’ll let him go)
4: won’t need it!
Woohoo! A three nap day! I’m pretty sure we stopped waking to feed by his age but I definitely capped naps. I wish I was more of a “go with the flow” person but I’m not so I micromanaged nap times as much as I could lol.
I too am a micromanager 
My children are strongminded about some things and we have never held to a proper schedule. My BFFs baby (now young child) THRIVED on a schedule which was lucky because her mum did too. I thought I would like timed schedules but turns out they just stressed me. I’ve never woken either of them for a feed, even as a newborn, because they were asking for food more frequently than 4 hourly and after the first couple of weeks it doesn’t matter and they can go much longer between feeds. They let me know it’s time to drop a nap by starting to be difficult to fall asleep at night, generally, or increased sleep issues for naptimes. They mostly fed and slept when they ask for it. These are my individuals and I’m not sharing because i think all babies are the same, but just that this is what we’ve done.
Also, dropping a nap is hard because they don’t like the current arrangement any more but ALSO can’t quite last long enough without the extra nap they used to have. I think it took us about a month for each nap drop to become clearly a need and then make it out the other side of the exhaustion. Agree with Biblio that the crappy little nap is too be embraced as a transition tool.
I have a general life rule that you never wake a sleeping baby after the newborn period.
We’re only waking during the daytime at the three hour mark (if he’s not already awake, which he usually is) because that’s what our pediatrician advised, to make sure he gets enough to eat during the day and minimize the need for calories at night. It’s worked well for us so far!