Evening nap or bedtime??

martacaroline

How do you know if you should put your LO wherever they nap, or, in my case, swaddle and put them upstairs where they will be for the night? 

My son naps quite a bit, and I guess out of convenience, I chose his 8 P.M. tired time to put him down for the night. Since I don't go to bed until 9-10 sometimes, I lose 1-2 hours of his longest stretch to sleep.

I'm afraid that if I put him in the swing for a nap at 7 let's say, he might sleep until 11 or later and then I have used my longest stretch on something other than sleep.

How do YOU know? 

snicksnack

With DD and now DS I put them down for bed when I go to bed that way I go to sleep and that starts their longest stretch, up until then I make sure they eat every three hours or so and will wake them to eat if needed.  With DS, who is 6 weeks, that is usually 11 or so but he is napping at 7 some nights and it has not been an issue. With DD when I went back to work at 12 weeks she would sleep about 10:30 to 5.  Once I noticed she was getting up later in the morning I would move her bedtime up so it went from 10:30 to 10 and then 9 and finally 7:30 and I think that was around 5 months.  I always found it easier on me if I had them sleeping for the night when I was sleeping. 

UMichGirl

How do we know?  We don't. 

We were just talking about this tonight.  DS had a bottle around 7pm so he'll be hungry to eat again around 10pm...but in the meantime, do we try to keep him up or do we let him nap in that stretch?  (Or do we put him down for the night then?)  The problem I'm worried about is if we do have him go to sleep for the night at that point, or even have him nap at that point, is he'll be wide awake at 4am and up for the day.  However if we do try and keep him up so he goes to bed when we do, we have a hard time getting him to go down because he's overtired.

I'll be interested to hear what some other responses are to this as well!

greyeyes15

late posting, but this was my question for awhile too.

our 3 month olds eat every 4 hours during the day so their last feeding is at 10 before we go to bed.  we then wake them up around 6 if they havent already woken so they can eat.  if they are sleeping at a feed time during the day they get woken to eat.  we've done this since birth and have had no problem getting them to bed for the night in their cribs and sleeping the entire night.  i was scared about having twins on different schedules so we were adamant about getting them on one soon as they were born.