How much is a 5 month old supposed to nap?

[missbella]

DS will be 5 months tomorrow and his napping has become very sporadic the last few days.  Today he has barely slept at all. He woke up at 4am, 5am, we got up at 6am. He slept from 7ish -8:30, 11:15-noon, and 2:00-2:30. Now it's 4:30 and he is still awake but tired. He is not being super cranky or fussy. He usually goes to bed between 6:30-7:00 and wakes at 12:30am to nurse and he goes right back down. This doesn't seem like enough sleep. Anything I can/need to do about this?

TIA!

[redheadk]

It's fuzzy since DD is 2 so hopefully someone that remembers better will chime in, but when DD started fighting her routine, it normally meant she was ready to drop a nap. He might be ready to go to 2 naps instead of 3. Or it could just be a phase.

You are welcome for my incredibly helpful post 

[AlpineSlide]

My DS napped for a total of at least 3 hours at the age (and roughly 11 hours for night sleep). Usually it was 2 naps that were 1.5 hours long each. Or 2 shorter naps and then one nap that was an hour+.

By 6 months he was definitely down to just 2 naps and it followed the 2-3-4 schedule perfectly. So you might was to work your way to that. Good luck!

[formerlyllizzyb]

That sounds very much like my 5 month old was. Sorry.

[robot]

That sounds quite normal to me. 3 naps a day at 5 months is fairly typical (though not written in stone, by any means). It actually sounds like a decent amount of nap sleep to me, but my second doesn't need a ton of sleep, so that's the experience most recent in my head. Neither of my kids did predictable long naps (>1 hr) very often until they consolidated into two or one nap per day.

[VillainV]

Sounds normal...and WAY better than C when he was 5 months old. Heck, better than him NOW most days.

On weekends we normally get one nap from maybe 8:30-9:30, another from 12-1, and if we're lucky, a third nap from 3-3:30ish. Then he's in bed around 6 (MOTN wake-up at 3:30 and sometimes doesn't fall back asleep till 4:30), then up again at around 7. So he sleeps maybe 14.5 hours a day, with 2.5 hours of those being naps. If we're lucky.

At daycare, some days he only gets one nap, some days he gets two. We're lucky if we get 90 minutes of nap total while he's at daycare. Same night-time schedule.

ETA:  5 months was when C really started to interact with things. He LOVES toys, playing, looking around the room, making faces.  He spends a lot of his waking time actively engaged with something/someone.  It can be hard to catch his drowsy-but-awake window because he's SO HAPPY playing, then can go to super-fussy in a few minutes, with maybe one eye-rub in there.   If we miss the window, sometimes he just won't nap.

[jeaniebueller]

My DS only catnapped until he went down to one nap and then I got an hour if I was lucky. I just think that some kids hate naps. You current schedule looks fine to me.

[natablue]

At that age, DS was still taking three naps a day, now he's transitioning down to two.

His naps are never consistent, sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes two hours. The times of day vary, too. I just follow his sleepy cues, as does daycare.