Huh. I’m surprised at these responses because I had read that CIO didn’t work very well for naps and that definitely was my experience (not throwing shade; I might have tried harder if I’d known so many people had success). However, she was napping in a RNP/crib, she’d just only do it for like 36 minutes at a time. If I really wanted/needed her to get a good nap I’d hold her.
That said, she pretty quickly fell in line with naps after ending the nurse to sleep routine at night and doing CIO at bedtime. In our case once she knew how to self soothe she was pretty easily able to apply those techniques to nap time.
That said, she pretty quickly fell in line with naps after ending the nurse to sleep routine at night and doing CIO at bedtime. In our case once she knew how to self soothe she was pretty easily able to apply those techniques to nap time.
So this is my goal with doing bedtime CIO first. We already don’t actually nurse her to sleep. We do storytime afterward because I didn’t want her to associate bedtime with nursing. Three nights this week, she was so tired that she fell asleep on my boob and would not be woken for storytime. But that is unusual.
Of course, as I’m wanting to transition to crib naps, she of course fell asleep in her car seat on our way home from the grocery store so I’m just leaving her. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Update: I have been paying attention to the 2-3-4 schedule. She took her first nap in the car seat. I just got her down for her second nap, about 10 minutes shy of 3 hours after she woke up from her first. Wow. She’s never gone down for a crib nap that easily at home.
We did CIO for naps first. I planned to do CIO for bedtime too, a few weeks later once we moved him to his nursery, but we didn’t end up having to; he went right down and STTN the first night we moved him over. I think the nap time CIO made the bedtime transition easier.
That’s awesome you had success! We never had much luck with any method for naps though we sleep trained for night time with success. Both of my kids just had to figure naps out for themselves when they were ready. There were a LOT of 30 minute naps in this house. DS is still very hit or miss with his naps at 9 months old.
Though I am not a CIO person, I did let DD CIO in her crib starting at 12.5 months for naps. She would just get too worked up from playing and hanging out and did not want to leave the fun but it was apparent she needed some rest. Luckily for me, she only cried for 5 minutes before she got it and quieted down.
Prior to that, she was a very unscheduled baby, napped very inconsistently so this was my last ditch attempt.