40min naps

Hi all,
My 5mth old son has just learnt to settle himself to sleep (still using a dummy though). He seems to enjoy going to his cot and even laughs sometimes when we put him down for a sleep.
Our main problem now though is that he will wake up after 40-50mins and we can not get him to go back to sleep again.
That would be fine however he will only play happily for 1hr so his routine of PLAY/SLEEP/FEED doesn't work. He is happy to eat every 3-4hrs but sleeps every 1hr.
Any suggestions?

Hi there,
My baby is nearlly seven months old and is the same. She has been like this since about 4 months old. we now have to play / feed / sleep / play routine. It is common for her to wake / play then sleep (skipping the feed) then feed when she awakes again. This seems to work fine now, but did through me to start with. If i try and resettle her we will be screaming 2 hrs later still. I make a rule that if she wakes up happy she can get up, but if she wakes up crying and i go in to get her and she rubs her eyes, i just rewrap her give her a cuddle and she will go back to sleep. All babys are different, but yeh this is working for me (no real choice - LOL ! )

Hi Kelly
In a nut shell you have to teach him how to go from one sleep cycle to the next...basically he's catnapping, not a fun habit to break but it can be done. This is roughly what Jebs routine was at 5 months...
7am - wake, bottle
8:00am - solids
9am - sleep
11am - wake, bottle
12pm - solids
1pm - sleep
3pm - wake, bottle
4:30pm - nap of up to an hour (dropped this around 5.5 months)
5:30pm - solids
6pm - bath
6:45pm - bottle
7:15pm - bed
10:30pm - dreamfeed
Jeb was still doing a dreamfeed (which I probably could have dropped) as he wasn't doing 3 solid meals yet (I just added where I would have fed him).
To teach Jeb to re-settle himself between sleep cycles I would go in as soon as I heard him stir and replace his dummy and leave the room. Sometimes this worked but mainly not, so I would wait 5 mins of him crying out (not going ferral but) go in replace dummy, calm him down then leave the room and kept repeating this until he went back to sleep. It did take a couple of weeks before he was doing it by himself. I went through this when Jeb was about 3 months so I not sure how this would work with a 5 month old? Hope I have helped a little? smile