-Naps are on mommy. Seriously, he’s napping on my chest right now while I’m at the computer. Just like a newborn baby he loves sleeping over my heart. He really likes skin to skin for this and sleeps very well when he’s pulled my tanktop down to my belly button.
-Routine. He takes one nap a day and we always have the same routine though not always at the same time. It’s lunch, potty, then nap. I always put the same blue blanket on him, no matter how hot it is, as sort of a clue that it’s nap time. Sometimes I have to cover his face with it, and sometimes I need to hold him to me gently to get him to calm down enough, but he always naps like this.
-For night, we had trouble when transferring him from my arms to his bed. We realized it had a lot to do with the sudden change in temperature. The solution? Flannel sheets. I bought them at Babies R Us and he doesn’t wake up when I move him anymore since there’s no sudden change in temp.
-Noise. While it’s relatively quiet whilc he sleeps, he seems to be more comfortable with sounds. We were tempted to get him a radio for his room since he sleeps so well to music but he doesn’t seem to need one right now. He does need me to be talking or singing while he falls asleep, though.
-”Lay Down”. Yeah, it might seem mean, but some nights he simply doesn’t want to go to sleep and we have to say “lay down” in a firm voice. I learned that this worked on our first week home, when I was getting particularly testy with him. Whenever we say “lay down” he flops down and holds still for about 30 seconds. I get the feeling he’s heard this before since he seems to be trying to feign sleep until I’m gone. Often enough, he’ll actually fall asleep during those 30 seconds. This also works when it’s really early in the morning and he wakes up wanting to play. One “lay down” and he’s out for another 20 minutes (not enough to make mommy happy but enough to get him some good sleep). At 11 months the child might be too young to hear that, but for our 19-24 month old it works (though I feel like a big meanie when I say it.

Of course, this is advice coming from someone who’s been a mom for all of a month… But that’s what helped our boy. He does LOVE to sleep on me, and when we first got him, as upset as he was with us, he still needed us to rock him to sleep. In fact we kept him in a hip hammock and he’d just fall asleep.