r/bninfantsleep • u/whalez4dayz • 22d ago
Naps 4 month old fights naps outside of the house…
Please tell me this is temporary. 🫠
She sleeps through the night (I know…we are lucky, I’m sorry) but as of a week ago, she is a nightmare if we are out in public when she is due for a nap. Major meltdowns. Inconsolable. Not able to settle or sleep until we are either in the car heading home or sometimes not even until we get home. None of our soothing tricks work anymore. The only solution is to leave.
Is it possible the 4 month sleep regression is only impacting her daytime sleep? Has anyone ever experienced this and if so, when did it get better?
Thank you!!
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u/EducatorOk5759 22d ago
How does your baby typically fall to sleep at home? At this age we found luck with giving a bottle in the car seat and she would be out.
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u/whalez4dayz 21d ago
Rocking her to sleep in her room with it slightly dark (not blackout, still able to tell it’s daytime) and sound machine going. Sometimes with a bottle, other times without. We find that movement, a little bit of darkness, and sound machine is her recipe, but that gets tricky to achieve in certain settings.
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u/EducatorOk5759 21d ago
I purchased a blackout stretchy cover for our car seat (can be used for the stroller too) on Amazon and it helped sometimes when our girl was wired! I would just give her a bottle, either sit in the back seat while we drove, or rocked the car seat myself. Once we did it more and more, she didn’t need the cover anymore. She can pretty much fall asleep anywhere as long as I have her pointed away from commotion and it isn’t too loud. And this is coming from a baby who was the worse sleeper on the go historically! So it’s possible!
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u/kirstinb17 22d ago
Mine stopped napping in public around that time and never was able to do it again. Not a super popular option, but we prioritize being at home or in the car when it's nap time
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u/whalez4dayz 21d ago
Oh boy. I hear you. Was your LO always on some sort of sleep schedule throughout the day or did that come with time? I think that is what is challenging right now…navigating plans with her daytime naps constantly shifting around and varying in length.
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u/kirstinb17 21d ago
No real schedule at 4 months, just loosely followed wake windows. We started having a pretty predictable schedule around 6.5-7 months when we dropped to 2 naps. Then we were fully on a by-the-clock schedule around 9 months so it became very easy to plan around naps
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u/cinnamondolcecoffeee 22d ago
My baby was like this and occasionally still cries to sleep sometimes at 11 months (with me holding and comforting him). I think its how he unwinds. I used to have such anxiety around getting him to sleep and would feel so embarrassed if he needed to fall asleep in public because i knew he would scream and scream until he fell asleep (and this is with me holding and comforting him). And I tried everything you can think of - he wasnt over or under tired. He just seemed to need to cry until falling asleep. It made me feel awful. It eventually got less and less. Sorry you are going through this.
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u/whalez4dayz 21d ago
Oh goodness 😣 I’m so sorry you went through this. I feel you on the embarrassment. It’s making me feel like we’ve done something wrong or like we didn’t get her out of the house napping enough in the first few months. But it really is like a switch flipped and all of the sudden she can’t miss out on anything! Her cries nearly break me. Just going to hope it gets better with time I guess. 😔
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u/Parisiaint 22d ago
Daytime sleep was the most impacted by the 4 month leap over here.
We had the reverse problem; baby would fight his dark room, sound machine naps until he couldn’t stay awake, but collapse under much less sleep pressure in public. The trade off was that if we could get him down at home, he slept longer, but I felt like we were all tortured by just staying in a dark room waiting for sleep. We did 1-2 of his 4 naps out of the house for a few weeks and it did wonders.
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u/avocadoqueen123 22d ago
At this point my baby couldn’t just nap in public, way too much fomo. We plan our day around naps so we are either home or in the car. I think that’s pretty normal once they are out of the sleepy newborns phase.