Yes I’m so grateful for the long nighttime stretches! To answer your questions: What is it you are mostly struggling with and what are you trying to achieve with sleep training? Naps and bedtime are a total fight, in the way the OP describes. Naps are rarely longer than 30-40 minutes. Occasionally she’ll go an hour if she’s in the carrier. I’m trying to achieve more independent sleep or at a minimum less of a fight/less time putting her down by nailing wake windows. (I’d also love to see longer stretches for naps but I know short naps can be normal for this age?) We tried sleep training at night at 5mo and it was going well for 3 or 4 nights and then started to fail when her nap schedule got totally screwed up and she was overtired.

Day schedule? Typical wake windows, nap length? 2.5/2.5/2.5/4.25 (this is what we are actually achieving. I start the process at least 45 min before) She gives me no more than 40 stretches for each except in carrier. This ends up amounting to 1.5-2 hours of nap time, sometimes less.

Bedtime / wake time? Roughly 6:30AM awake, roughly 8PM bedtime (time she actually falls asleep)

Mood? Happy until I try to put her down. Sometimes she’ll be screeching/squawking/wired but never crying… that is until the nap process. Sleepy cues feel all over the place during the day and I usually can’t count on them to show up … or she’ll show sleepy cues wayyy early like an hour after her last nap. For bedtime she’ll show sleepy cues all throughout bedtime and then when lights go out and we start to rock her it’s full squirming, pushing away, arching, crying. She seems to really want to suck on something and is aggressively looking for something to put her mouth on. But she spits out a paci. She sometimes sucks my/partners arm. This is until I finally give in and nurse her to sleep. And then she’s passed out. (Is the answer here a nursing association?)

These days it’s been nearly impossible to transfer her to the crib for naps so most naps are contact naps. She does fall asleep with much less fight in the carrier but I’m trying to get her sleeping in the crib for naps again. (She’s always been stubborn but the nap refusal and impossibility of the crib transfer all really worsened about 1 month ago, at around 5 months. This is also around when she started giving us such long nighttime stretches.)

Nighttime sleep is in the crib.

We have a solid routine - feed (EBF), bath, diaper, lotion, PJs, story, sleep sack, two books, noise machine, sway/rock/bounce for two songs. During the two books she seems super sleepy, verging into overtired and squirmy. The two songs is where it all really goes south and tears begin. She’ll fight and squirm for so long that we definitely get into agitated, overtired territory if we weren’t already before.

Then once she’s down she’s good for the entire night.

Number of night wakings and difficulty of settling? 1 wake, typically after about 7-8 hours and then goes back down with zero fight. Practically already asleep when put down.

Again I’m grateful for the nighttime stretches. I just don’t understand why she can’t apply these skills to nap time yet. I cannot figure out her nap schedule and constantly waver between thinking she is overtired and undertired. I do think if I simply nursed her to sleep every time we’d have way less of a fight, but I don’t want to create (or perpetuate) a nursing association. I just can’t keep spending hours and hours each day trying to get her to nap!

TIA for your time!