We have a six month old who has always been a ‘bad sleeper’ but we’re really reaching a new level recently. We talked with a sleep consultant who diagnosed him as under tired because he was taking really long naps at daycare and we were putting him to bed too early. But now we’re really starting to wonder if that is true.
Based on the sleep consultant’s advice, we are aiming for 13 hours of sleep, 11 hours awake. He is in daycare, and so his naps are a bit out of our control. He will usually nap about 2-2.5 hours at daycare. We do a cat nap when we pick him up from daycare, 5:15-5:45, and he goes to bed around 9 - 9:30, depending on his total nap hours for that day. His wake windows are typically 2.5/2.5/2.5/3.5
The past couple of nights he fell asleep fine at bedtime, but then had multiple false starts. He would sleep for 30 minutes, wake up, cry for 30 minutes, fall asleep for another 30 minutes, for about 3 hours. That continued into night two. After his 2am bottle, he was really hard to get back to sleep and woke up crying several times again. We have had versions of these nights for weeks.
He can fall asleep independently at bedtime and at nap time (when at daycare); we started sleep training him at 4 months old (CIO).
Any thoughts? Is he under tired or over tired? As I said above, the sleep consultant thinks that he is under tired, but we don’t understand how that could be the case given he is sleeping so little at night. He’s up for large chunks of the night, and so he’s not actually getting 13 hours of sleep.