Trouble with Naps- need ideas

[lizsky]

It is SO hard to get my 2 month old DD to fall asleep. I've read books and asked friends what they do, but nothing is helping. The books (I've read Dr. Sears, No Cry Sleep Solution, Happiest Baby on the Block, Weisbluth book, 90min sleep book) seem to focus either on night time sleep or helping babies sleep for longer stretches...but my problem is that DD just won't drift off...It seems like everyone I talk to nurses their baby to sleep and it works for them, but I nurse DD and she finishes and is still wide awake. Anyone else have this problem?

Right now our napping routine is to swaddle, nurse, rock/bounce and sing, and then lie down (either next to me in bed or in the cosleeper). We go through multiple cycles of her eyes getting heavy and *almost* falling asleep, but then she will jerk herself awake...it typically takes 1 hour or more just to fall asleep and oftentimes she doesn't settle into it and wakes after just a few minutes. I've tried wearing her, but she HATES it and gets really agitated. I've tried putting her in a swing, but she doesn't find it soothing and cries. What am I missing?

[tzs]

it took me about 2 months to get my sleep-fighter to nap. what helped was #1) the nap advice in the weis....guy's book. the timing really helped. i think at that age it was every 1.5-2 hours? i think before that i hadn;t really caught on that she needed that first morning nap and that it should be closer to 1.5 hours, so she was probably getting overtired. but even so, we would get the timing right but it seemed that if i didn;t really watch the clock everything would be in shambles by the end of the day
#2) what happens when she doesn't sleep? does she just stay awake or does she cry? mine would cry and of course i would always go to her. well, it took one day of being stuck in the bathroom for a couple minutes for me to realize that sometimes when she cried she was just fighting the sleep and she needed the release (i am NOT advocating CIO, this was literally like 2 minutes.) i remember running from the bathroom to find her asleep. i was amazed, this baby never just fell asleep. she actually started crying again and i just watched her and again after a minute or two drifted off and it was the first real nap she had ever taken.
askmoxie has a really good article about it that someone here had posted:
http://moxie.blogs.com/askmoxie/2006...s_and_cio.html

the good news is that although she is not the babe who will just pass out on her own, we have a great routine going and she both reliably naps and falls asleep right away at night and sleeps through.

[BetsyS]

My little babies have needed help falling asleep, too. One nursed to sleep (which was fabulous, and that's what I'm hoping for baby #3), but the other.... Oh, boy. He didn't ever nurse to sleep. LOL

What worked for him was a bit of movement. I would swaddle, then put him in the bouncy seat, set it to vibrate, then also use my foot to bounce it even more. If he would have taken a pacifier (he wouldn't), I would have added that. The additional bounce somehow worked. Oh, and during this, he didn't like eye contact. If I looked at him, he took it as a cue to stay awake longer. So, no eye contact, bouncing, and the swaddle. And, he'd usually fall asleep pretty quickly.