To Heather #2 - I would say Maya is a touchy baby. She has kept us on our toes since day 1. For the first 10 days of her life, we were lucky to get her to sleep for 3 or 4 hours in the bassinet ine the middle of the night. Other than that, she would not sleep unless she was held. SHe also had weight-gain and digestive issues so there came many a time in those first few weeks when we had to let her sleep in someone arms so I could keep her awake long enough to eat so she wouldn't wind up back in the hospital.
To answer your question...she is on a rough 3-hour EASY, for several reasons. Though she is 5-1/2 mos, she only weighs 12.5 lbs. On the 3-hour EASY, she gets five feeds a day. She does not take a dream feed (it took so long to get her to bed some nights there was NO way I was going to disturb her to eat), so if I went to a 4-hour EASY, she would only get four feeds a day, and with her size, I am concerned that wouldn't be enough, and she'd start to wake it night. She sleeps 7:45pm to 7:45am with no wakings, and I don't want to mess with that.
As for the late afternoon nap, I don't let her sleep past 5pm (though she does occasionally get a 10-15 minute catnap while we take our evening walk). I feed her when she gets up (usually between 4:15pm and 5pm), my husband and I take her for a walk, and we start her bedtime feed at 7pm, and as I said, she's down by 7:45pm.
You're right about finding a happy medium. It took about 2 to 2-1/2 weeks to get her on EASY at about 4 mos. Before than she was on a slightly different schedule that was working for us, but it all went south when the entire extended family showed up for a long weekend for her baptism. She went four days without a nap (everytime we put her down in the crib, my MIL and SIL would go in there, poke her until she cried trying to get her to smile, and then pick her up because she was crying), and the no-napping went on for about two weeks before I said enough is enough. But I digress...the happy medium...I made a commitment to stay home during the day as long as it took to get her on a good schedule. Now we try to run errands during her activity period. If we have to be out during a nap, I try to make it the late afternoon nap, and we start her bedtime routine earlier (by 1/2 hour or so) on those days.