Naps and bedtime

Socialworkgirl

DD is a great night time sleeper.  She will fall asleep between 7 and 7:30 and sleep until about 6:30 AM most nights.  However, naps have always been a struggle.  I cannot get her to take more than a 30 minute nap.  And it seems like 1/2 to 1/3 of days she barely naps at all.

She still seems to get sleepy about every 2 hours.  She has been napping at about 9,  11:45, and seems to get sleepy about 2:30 or 3 but it seems like more days than not, I can't get her to take that 3rd nap.  Often, she will also get sleepy around 5pm but I don't try to get her to nap because we start her bed time routine at 6:15 or 6:30.

I am thinking that I should either try to stretch the time before her 1st and 2nd naps to get her down to 2 naps or let her take a 3rd nap later in the day-like 5 PM and move her bedtime later.  I think I would rather go with the first option because it would be great to have her on a 2 nap schedule, I don't want to mess up a good thing with the night time sleep, and it works pretty well for DH and I to have her go to bed pretty early.

 However, I'd be interested in others' thoughts.  She is still held/fed to sleep almost all the time.  I know that it's bad, but I am not ready to do CIO until I get her on somewhat of a better nap schedule. 

yepyepsms

My son is just slightly older than yours about about 2-3 weeks ago dropped his third nap and spaced out naps number one and two and they got longer.  He used to nap at 9,11.and 3ish.  Now he naps at 9 and 1ish, and both are usually an hour each.  His naps used to be 20-40 minutes. He's never been a good napper, so I've been pretty pumped about these longer naps.  Not every day, but most days he's on this new schedule.  On the weekends sometimes the third nap will return.  He seems happier too.  Anyway, we had a rough couple of weeks before he landed on this new schedule, so I feel like babies have a couple of weeks where they are "working it out" to get to only two naps, and, in the process have a cranky, "fight the third nap" mentality.  Maybe this is what's going on for your LO too? 

bigbootyjudi

We were having this issue too.

The problem was that he was waking up because he was hungry. He eats every 3 hours, on the dot, and has a 2 hour awake time. So, he'd get up from his nap at 10am, eat right when he got up, go down around 12pm, take about 20-30 minutes to fall asleep, and then wake up 30 minutes later when he was due to eat.

So, we switched things up. Now, when he wakes up, he gets his solids and then about 45 minutes later gets his bottle. That way, when he goes down for a nap, it's only been 1.5 hours since he's eaten and he has a good 1.5-2 hours until he's due to eat again.

It's been working really well for us and now we get one hour stretches out of him, at least.

Oh, and we actually moved his bedtime up and it's helped. Sleep begets sleep. He goes down around 6:30pm and falls asleep by 7pm, whereas we used to have him going down at 8pm. He sleeps until around 6:30am, then naps around 9-10, 12-1, 3-4.

Socialworkgirl

Thanks all! this is helpful! Keep it coming!