How Long Did It Take The Baby To Get Used To Napping At Daycare?

He's never napped the way he's supposed to, and it got worse when he started daycare. How long did it take him to get used to napping in a noisy daycare?

Background 

From the beginning, he's been a bit of an odd sleeper. At 11 weeks, he was sleeping soundly through the night (~10 pm to ~5:30 am), and he never napped the way he was supposed to. We tried everything we could think of to get him to nap including the following:

• breastfeeding him to sleep
• rocking him to sleep in a quiet room
• white noise (a heater, a fan, and/or a white noise machine)
• warming his sheets
• exhausting him to sleep through activity
• letting him sleep in our laps with noise all around him
• letting him sleep in our laps in quiet rooms
• wearing him and walking on a treadmill until he slept

Some helped a little, and on a good day, he naps for 2-3 hours between 8 am and 5 pm.

He's very sensitive to noise also. Something as simple as my knee popping when I stand up or the sink turning on in another room is enough to get him fully awake. Thus, it's likely no surprise that he has trouble sleeping at daycare where he has to listen to other children crying. Surely he'd get used to it within a few weeks and start taking long naps though right?

Napping Data

Our goal is for him to get 2 hours of nap time while he's at daycare (8:30 am to 5:00 pm). The most obvious check on if he's getting better at it is to plot his nap length vs time throughout his entire tenure at daycare. He started at 12 weeks old on January 11th, and the data show the following:

As you can pretty clearly see, he's made no significant improvements with time. Another way to look at it would be to see how consistent his naps are. A histogram is provided below:

He pretty steadily gets ~1 hour per day. His average number of naps a day is 2.1 +/- 0.4. He typically naps at ~11 am and again at ~2 pm.

Conclusions

We worried a lot about this. We even switched day cares to try to help with it, but he was much worse at the other daycare (<45 minutes of naps per day) so we moved him back. We ended up being sort of ok with it because:

• He sleeps 11-12 hours solidly at night and in the morning
• He doesn't nap much better at home in completely ideal conditions
• He is moving to a different class with older babies who have more regular nap schedules starting in a few weeks
• He is developing normally and hitting all milestones
• He does not seem grumpy or overly fatigued
• I was a worse napper than him as a baby; I apparently started sleeping through the night at 5 weeks and never napped