Nap Time and Weaning

Nap time has become something of a struggle.

We’ve entered into Phase 3 of weaning. Phase 1 was night weaning. Phase 2 involved cutting out Sadie’s morning feeding. And now, Phase 3 means no more nursing before naptime. There was a one-month gap between each of the “Phases” and so far it’s worked out pretty well for us. At least it has from my point of view.

Phase 4 is set to launch towards the end of March and will complete the whole weaning process. It will mean no more night time feeding. I have a feeling that it might be the most disastrous of the phases. We can distract Sadie pretty well during the day… but she still pretty attached to nursing, particularly her bedtime feeding. She gets teary if it’s late…

But for now I’m focusing on Phase 3. Sadie doesn’t really see why she should take a nap if she isn’t going to have a naptime feeding. Nap time yesterday went something like this:

We told Sadie it was nap time and she hoped into her big girl bed. Then she sat up and giggled. We had been riding around in the tractor an hour earlier and she sat up, pointed to the side of the house that the tractor was parked on and said :

“Ga… ga… gump… pa… gump… gum…pa…. gumpa… ga….. gumpa….. gumpa…..”

She went on that way for at least fifteen minutes repeating “Grumpa” over and over again. I finally, hopeful still, started to read Goodnight Moon. She lay back on her pillow until we got to the picture of the three little bears sitting on chairs and then she jumped up enthusiasticially and grabbed her two bears, Chris and Oatmeal. Next I got a lesson on how her bears were like the bears in the pictures. They both had the same ears and noses. Sleep was a little bit further away after that.

I decided to give it the Super Nanny try and sit in the chair and let her figure out sleeping on her own. She grabbed the curtains. I said no. She cried. She laid down. She sat up. She giggled. She leaned off the bed and snagged every toy she could reach and pulled them onto the bed. She played. She threw them off the bed and started to cry. She laid back down.

After nearly an hour of this she got off the bed and ran crying over to me. Since we are still weaning I had offered to rock her in the rocking chair earlier (she had refused and gotten into bed). Now the rocking chair idea didn’t seem quite so bad. She curled up on my lap and I rocked. Two minutes later she was snoring and I gently put her back in the big girl bed.

I hope this gets easier soon!

Update: Today’s nap went much better! I gave Sadie a choice: I told her that she could be rocked to sleep in the rocker and then put in her bed, or she could go straight into her big girl bed and fall asleep. She opted for the rocker, changed her mind, tried out the big girl bed and then finally got up and sprinted back to me (I was still in the rocker knitting). So I rocked her to sleep and she is now soundly asleep. And it’s been 70 minutes, so it’s a good nap! Yay!