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I am roughly 3 and a half months into parenting my sweet baby boy. It’s been a rollercoaster to say the least!
It seems like every day there is a new challenge, new skill he’s learned, and new piece of the baby puzzle to figure out. I’d like to think I’m handling it well, but in reality, I find myself constantly stressing. The latest stressor: cat naps.
About a month ago he went through a sleep regression where all of the sudden he could not connect sleep cycles during nap time. Once week I was posting on TikTok asking “should I cap my baby’s long naps?!”, because THAT was the current stressor. Were the long naps making it so he couldn’t sleep through the night? Were they too long? Was capping them the answer?
Be careful what you wish for because the very next week he was napping 30ish minutes for each nap even though he was absolutely exhausted!
I was immediately obsessed with searching the internet high and low for a solution.
Longer wake windows, shorter wake windows, switching swaddles, no swaddle, eating before nap, pacifier, sucking thumb, putting him to sleep on my chest, rocking him sitting up, laying him drowsy but awake in the bassinet, crib instead of bassinet, etc. etc. etc. You name it, I tried it.
Wanna know what was successful? NONE of it.
No matter what I tried, he continued to stick to 30 minute naps. He grew increasingly exhausted, I grew increasingly stressed.
The only thing that was working to actually get him to sleep was contact naps. I had to either lay in the bed with him on my chest or wear him in my carrier. With maternity leave coming to an end I worried how I’d be able to let my overtired baby get his sleep in. He had to be touching me to sleep, and when he was awake he was fussy.
It’s been a little under a month since these cat naps have started. And today, he has finally taken 2 longer naps in the bassinet completely ON HIS OWN. No contact!
Care to know the secret to beating the cat naps? Letting your baby get there when they’re ready.
Perhaps it was the new diapers I tried, the longer wake window, the off nap schedule yesterday. I’ll never know for sure.
But my mother’s intuition is telling me that, while one or some of those could have contributed, what it really came down to was him finally being ready.
I was stressing over something I couldn’t control. I tried my hardest to control it, that’s for sure. But I wasted countless hours obsessing and stressing over trying to find the solution when it wasn’t for me to find.
The solution was giving my baby time, and letting him find it on his own. I was trying to force him to be ready for something he simply wasn’t ready for.
Now are his naps all fixed now? No, not even close. Progress isn’t linear. But I know now that he’s developmentally ready and now is the time for me to try and help it along since he can handle it.
The lesson I hope to takeaway from this is to cut out the stress. Babies are learning how to be people, and there are infinite skills that come along with that. I can stress and obsess all I want to, but all that will do is make for a negative experience for me and waste my own time.
There will be hard times, absolutely. And it doesn’t hurt to look into things and try something out. But if your little one isn’t ready for something, there is just no forcing them into it. Their little bodies and brains aren’t ready, and we as parents need to give them the time and space to get there on their own.
Does this mean I magically will no longer stress over things or will automatically remember during the next difficult phase we are in to let my son get there on his own time? Hell no. I wish it were so simple. I’m sure I will learn this lesson over and over and over again.
But I guess If I need to give him the time and space to get there on his own, I need to give that to myself, too.
