"I’ve read your book and have been trying to follow the NAPS plan for a little over a week now with my 5 ∏ month old son.  He has pretty standard cues – yawning, rubbing eyes and fussiness – which he sometimes exhibits as early as 20 minutes into the cycle.  Could use your advice on a couple issues:

a/ I will start to soothe him when he exhibits his sleep cues, but sometimes even 10-15 minutes after the 90 minute mark, he will still be awake.  I rock, sway, shush/sing (and sometimes end up nursing if he is hungry), but he won’t fall asleep.  In prep for sleep training, I’ve also been trying to put him into the crib when he is half asleep and not fully asleep, but sometimes I can’t even get him to that droopy eyelid stage.   Is he consolidating cycles even though he is showing signs of being tired?  At what point, should I give up trying to get him to sleep, and when I give up, should I wait for the next cycle?  On some days, I feel like I spend all day trying to get him to sleep!

b/ He wakes up for the day at a different time every morning (anywhere from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.!), and as a result, ends up feeding / napping / going to bed at different times each day.  His nap lengths are also all over the place – some days, it is 45 minutes, other times it is 1.5 hours.  The intervals between naps range anywhere from 90 minutes to 4 ∏ hours, but are never the same from day to day (e.g., on Monday, he will have a 90 minute interval b/n waking up and his first nap and on Tuesday, he will have a 3 hour interval).  He is also erratic with night sleeping – on a good night, he’ll sleep from 8 – 4:30, babble to himself before and then cry to be fed around 5; on a bad night, he’ll be up every 3 hours.  Is there anything I can do to encourage him to be a bit more consistent? Thanks!"

- Tina, New York

It sounds like your son is indeed a sleepy guy, and in fact I have heard descriptions like yours from a few other moms. Does he also take quite a bit of time to calm down? It sounds to me like he may be a baby that just has a harder time tuning out the world, so that he can fall asleep. It can be really hard for parents to read his signs of sleepiness because he is so distracted by all the interesting things to see in the world. So to my mind you are ahead of the game on that score.

Every once in a while, these moms with similar situations do try sleep training their babies. I would not necessarily recommend it for your little one because of his "distractibility" (for lack of a better word, and there probably is a better word for it, I just don't know what it is, "sensitive to visual sensations", perhaps?) These babies already have a hard time tuning things out, and need a lot of help with that, so giving them a crash course in doing it on their own just seems to be unlikely to succeed.

If he indeed is a baby that needs extra assistance in tuning out the world, the best approach is to make things as monotonous as possible for him at naptime. I would do this to help him fall asleep at naptime until he starts to sleep in a little bit longer stretches. Something really boring like rocking, something his eyes can't keep up with, that then disengages him enough so he can drop off to sleep.

After some number of days with this (wish I could be more specific), you should find he will not need so much help falling asleep.

But it's a process that takes a bit of time, I'm afraid. Do feel free to give me an update if you have time. I'd like to know what things you've tried in the meantime and what has worked for you.