Originally Posted by Unregistered:
She sleeps alone, on her back, but needs to be (at least one of the following): held/rocked/pacifier-ed to sleep. The only way for her to fall sleep without objection is to do all of them. Do one of them and she'll cry herself to sleep after several minutes. You can put her down just as she dozes off, she'll awake and often object briefly, but if you give her a pacifier she'll doze back off.
(*Most* of the time... again, my wife had a tendency to hold her to nap at least once a day or so... it was a long time before I got her to the point of not holding her for most of her naps).
That is actually a *vast* improvement. A handful of weeks ago, you had to sneak her into her crib well asleep or she'd wake and start wailing.
She is also however, a catnapper. A long nap is an hourish. Yesterday she did 45 min in the morning and an hour in the afternoon and that was a great day (plus a couple shorter ones - most are half an hourish - usually one sleep cycle). She often wakes up unhappy.
She has not yet learned to self-soothe. If you put her down awake, she'll cry. Soothing - short of a pacifier or picking up - has no effect. You can stand there rubbing her head, and shushing her, and holder her hand, for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and she just wails, arches her back and thrashes around (I don't really think it's a sign of reflux... just her own little tantrum. Sometimes she's fine being on her back, when she's already in a good mood, she can lay there and 'talk' with you and smile... so it's not like back=cry all the time)
I've been trying to work on this for months - esp the last month - and have made some, but modest-at-best, progress.
Everything (almost everything?) I read say crying-it-out is inappropriate before 6 months. I know it would hurt my wife to do it even then, but I don't think we should do it even yet.
I do trust the daycare. It's a high quality national brand and a very nice local franchise. But her main caretaker is actually telling us we shouldn't pick her up as much at home. I'm willing to consider it, but I wanted to hear opinions from others as well if that made sense, or what we should be doing/not doing.
One thing I'm noticing here is you mention tht she doesn't nap very long at a time and she wakes unhappy which I'm assuming means she isn't getting restorative sleep.
In my experience that is the definition of Baby who is held or entertained to sleep. The. What happens is as they arouse wake, they need to be held or entertained back to sleep. Which means they are not getting adequate sleep.
What needs to happen is she needs to be put to bed wide awake. She shouldn't be allowed to fall sleep in a swing, bouncer, or anything else.
Until she can learn to go to sleep alone and stay asleep alone, she isn't going to get good sleep. And she isn't going to do great at dycare.
She's tired when you pick her up because the daycare workers can't entertain every infant to sleep. So she's allowed to cry some there. Which is understandable in group care.
They may be trying to help her self soothe but as long as y'all are entertaining her to sleep, it just isn't going to go well.