Anyone else’s baby fights naps in the afternoon?!

My baby is 10 weeks now and will only contact nap in the sling during the morning/early afternoon. Night time she can go in her next to me but occasionally will want to bed share (safely of course). After 3pm ish, it’s always so hard to get her to nap, even in the sling! I don’t know what to do, but she just fusses and will be on the boob comfort feeding for like 40 mins at a time or she cries. I’ve tried all sorts of dummies and she just spits them out, only one she’s kept in the mouth for a couple minutes is the mam one. She ends up being overtired in the evening then when my partner comes home they don’t get to spend quality time together as she’s fussing or crying. What can I do except let her be latched onto me?

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This happened with my 8 week old for days and days and I had no idea why, until I offered her a bottle of expressed milk in the afternoon and for the first time in days she napped and had a great evening and went sleep perfectly. It was the first sign that my girl needed feeding more. I've now moved onto combi feeding because I don't make enough milk to pump as much as she wants, offering 1 formula bottle a day at midday has literally made all the difference x

My baby can be a bit of a nap wrestler. She's fine in the mornings but come afternoon she'll only nap in the carrier. Then early evening she only wants to contact nap and cluster feed but will either fight the nap or constantly wake up and get ratty because she's tired. By the time my partner gets home she'll usually be awake about an hour max but shes grumpy and not really wanting to be played or interacted with for more than about 10 minutes. I just make sure all the times he is home and she's not being a boob barnacle I keep passing her over to him so he doesn't feel left out or that they've spent no time together. She really enjoys playtime with him when she's not tired but when she is tired she can be extremely difficult so I completely understand 😅

@Saran I’ve tried feeding her formula and expressed breast milk in the evening before bed and she only took breast milk once. I might try it out midday and see if that makes a difference!

@Amanda that’s pretty much what we’re doing too! Basically only get the weekend for them to spend time together 😂

Is that because she hasn't been used to taking bottles? What bottles do you use?

@Saran that might be the problem, she’s used tommee tippee and mam bottles when she was a week old before breast milk came in. Then she barely used them after. She did use them last weekend when she stayed with family for a day but didn’t drink too much either then 😕

I've heard nothing but bad things about the tommee tippee bottles, we've used mam from the start and they're great. Nuk is also amazing, it may just be she's not used to it, always make sure you're offering it correctly and aiming the teat for the roof of baby's mouth

@Saran when is the best time to offer it to her? I haven’t tried aiming the teat up so will do that next time

If you're finding after 3pm she gets fussy and doesn't nap maybe aim for before then? I try to aim for somewhere between midday and 2pm so that she settles for a good afternoon nap xx

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