some napping questions

recently i've been having some napping issues here.
my LOs have been on the 2-3-4 schedule since about 6 months and now it's not quite working anymore. they wake up anywhere between 7:15 and 7:45 and generally fall asleep for their first nap around 10. Lately, they haven't been asleep since about 10:30 or so. The afternoon nap has always been at 2:00 and lately they just aren't falling asleep for that one either! when the finally fall asleep (anywhere between 2:30-3:15) they sleep for anywhere from 1 - 2 hours.

could they be ready for 1 nap? im not sure what their deal is lately and was hoping for some advice.

 

Sounds like what mine did. I think that for awhile you are going to stay on 2 naps, but the time between wake-up and nap time is going to stretch out for your guys - thus bed time might get pushed back too. My guys are 13 mos, did the 2/3/4 schedule, but around 10-11 mos started stretching out the time before nap times, so where it looks more like 1st nap at 10, and the second at 2:30/3 now. They wake up about 7. When they take that late nap they are going to bed closer to 8 now.

We do occassionally do 1 nap days, if they wake up on the late side, and if there are things going on in the morning to keep them entertained, BUT, when we do that they do get cranky by the end of the day, and end up in bed by like 6 (7 at the latest!).

 

It could be that they are getting ready to go to one nap a day, but they are still pretty young in my opinion. I would probably assume it's just a phase & keep putting them down at the regular times & hope it passes. I do remember my kids going through a couple of those types of phases before they actually did go to one nap a day.

 

Our sleep schedule started getting wonky about two months ago. I kept trying to put them down for two naps and in the last two weeks it's become clear that they aren't going for it. Alex will sometimes nap for 30 minutes in the morning depending on how early he gets up, but Nick hasn't napped in the morning in ages. He doesn't even fall asleep in his carseat while we're running errands. Our afternoon nap got shifted earlier to accomodate the abscence of the morning nap. I found that if I kept them up until their old nap time, they were often overtired and couldn't get to sleep.

 

At around 11-12 months I found that I needed to increase their wake time. For awhile we did a 3-3-4 schedule. Sometimes bedtime was as late as 8 p.m. with that schedule. Now, at 16 months, they take one nap some days and two naps on other days depending on how the first nap goes. I would caution against going to one nap too quickly. Even at 16 months mine get VERY cranky in the early evening if they only take one nap that day. We can hardly get through dinner because they are often melting down. Babies and toddler are tough sometimes. Good luck!

 

Same here! For at least 2 months now Brandon has been taking very short naps of 30-45 minutes. Once a blue moon he'll nap for 90+ minutes. For the past month Colin was pretty steady in the 45-60 minute range (usually only 45 min though), but even now Colin has started to nap for sometimes as little as 30 minutes. They never really had a set nap schedule, we basically just started the soothing process about 1.5-2 hours after they last woke, or whenever they started showing signs of fatigue. But it is like pulling teeth to get our boys to nap these days! There have been times where we started the soothing process as soon as they acted tired, and next thing you know I've been rocking B for 30 minutes straight (all while he is rubbing his eyes and yawning, yet fighting his nap) so I finally have enough and put him in his crib awake hoping he'll fuss himself to sleep, only to watch him on the monitor rocking, sitting, talking, fussing,etc for 30+ minutes, at which point I give up and go get him up. It's enough to drive me batty! I just flat out don't understand why these babies fight naps so bad at such a young age (they are only barely over 9 months adjusted, and this has been going on for 2+ months). Aaaargh!

 

I found that 3-3-3 worked better for us. Mine would be up around 9-9:30, down at 12 for nap, up around 1:30, down at 4:30-5 for a nap, then up around 6-6:30 and into bed around 9-9:30. Tinker with their up/down times a bit and see if you can find a happy medium.

I switched mine to one nap at 13 months out of necessity, but even then it was pretty early for a one nap schedule and it took about 3 weeks to get them used to only one nap a day.