Nap advice (AKA Mondays are hard)

[jillc0323]

My LO is 8 weeks old. All weekend the past 3 weeks, she has been an excellent sleeper both days and evenings. Mondays especially are a different story though. She will just take a short nap in the afternoon (maybe 45 minutes) and by the time I get home from work, she hasn't been up long but is grumpy/seemingly still tired. Trying to set her up to not get overtired, we have tried putting her back to sleep, but she fights it like crazy once I'm home. I'm definitely happy that she seems to want to play with me, but I don't want to set her up to get really overtired and hysterical either. I don't know if we should let her stay up and be grumpy or what, but no one has been happy the past three Mondays. Any advice is appreciated! 

[karlamo]

What does her nap schedule and bedtime look like right now?
At 8 weeks I'm guessing she's still needing to nap every 2 hours or so and for about 45 min each time. With our son he went on a 2-3-4 nap schedule at around 3 months when he went to daycare. We did a lot of feeding and napping on demand with him.

[jillc0323]

She's started to develop a little bit of a schedule, though not a very firm one. She's up between 6 and 7, usually just long enough to eat but sometimes up to an hour, and then naps for 1-2 hours. Then she's up again for maybe 2 hours or so, and then she takes another nap for an hour or two. Then she's up again for a longer stretch, maybe about 3 hours, and then down for another nap, maybe 45 minutes but sometimes longer. Then she's up until usually about 8-10 or so, depending on when her last nap was and how much she's fighting sleep and whether she's snoozed at all in that time since I've been home (i.e. short rest in the stroller, etc).

I really can't complain too much because she's a pretty good sleeper at night and is generally a pretty happy baby except when she's hungry. She's fed on-demand but we're still figuring out the naps, I think.

My gut feeling is that her stretch of being awake in the evening is too long for her, but she doesn't seem interested in going down for a nap either, so I'm not really sure what the right solution is.

[karlamo]

She sounds like she's behaving exactly like she should with naps. Evenings are hard cause the witching hour sucks. My guess it by 3 months she'll fall into more of a predictable bedtime. My son was colicky till 3 months so we operated in survival mode till it passed. At 3 months we started a low key, casual bedtime routine at around 7pm of bath, nurse, bounce on yoga ball to sleep then the ever dreaded, sweat induced crib transfer. He went to daycare at 3 months which helped immensely with getting him on a schedule.

[jillc0323]

Thanks a lot, this is really helpful!