Why shorten AM nap? 11 month old

[jlmlyle]

Hi there,

I have the 11 month old with sleep maybe going wonky, and I have tried to figure out how best to help her with the adjustment.  So I know I want to hang on to 2 naps as long as possible, and I know other problems can and will occur.  What I haven't found out is WHY people shorten the AM nap.  I think I need to do that, I just wanted to understand the reasoning and benefits.  Sometimes a shorter nap in the morning does NOT mean a better nap in the afternoon for my daughter.   

Our dilemma is she can stay up 3.5 hours for the AM wake time, about 4 hours for the 2nd wake time, but it really only gives us about 2 hours before bedtime, and I never let her go past 5:30 for the 2nd nap.  She does better with a bedtime around 7:30, but we are having irregular wake-up times that are creeping towards early waking.  Normal wake up would be 7:00 but there have been several 6:40, 6:30 and even a 6:00 waking.  Since she isn't upset, I still don't go in until about 7:00 am.  But sometimes she goes to bed as late as 8:00 and it doesn't cause her to sleep in.  So I am worried about night time sleep disturbances if I don't start tweaking this routine, and I think her 2nd nap is kind of late.

Anyway here is our routine.  Any thoughts? 3 bottles still not associated with naps, and 3 meals...

7:00 wakes (or lately anywhere from 6:30 -7:00) and bottle
8:30 breakfast
10:30 -12:00 ish 1st nap (usually 1.25-1.5 nap)
12:30 lunch
2:30 bottle
3:45/4:00-5:30 2nd nap (sometimes only an hour, sometimes up to 1.5 hr, it depends on if I put her down UT)
5:30 dinner
7:30ish  bottle and bedtime

Thanks so much!!!

[ckcole]

We started shortening the morning nap because we literally were running out of time in the day.  If I let DS sleep as long as he wanted to during the day, we would end up with a bedtime that was way too late.  So, to protect the rest of the day, I shortened the morning nap to 30 mins.  We also find that it doesn't necessarily mean a better afternoon nap, but it allows him to be up by 3/3:15, which in turn gives us a 7:15/7:30 bedtime. 
My thought is that the morning nap is the next one to disappear anyway.  We are just slowly getting rid of it.  Can she make it a longer A time before bed? Two hours seems short.

[KellyC]

There are a few reasons to shorten the morning nap.

There comes a point where your LO won't take 2 long naps in a day (mine actually never did it after the first few weeks!).  If the afternoon nap is the shorter of the 2 then your LO is likely to be over-tired by bedtime, which in turn could lead to an early waking the next morning.

The next stage will be to have just 1 nap a day and this will usually fall just after lunch.  If you can establish a long after lunch nap now, it's not too much of a change when that time comes.

The idea would be to have less A time before the morning nap so your LO only needs a short sleep.  When mine were doing 45 minute morning naps I didn't put them down any later than 9.30am.  At the end, before they dropped the nap, they were literally having a 15 minute powernap at around 10am.  I wouldn't let the am nap go any longer than 45 minutes, so just one sleep cycle.

You then have to bear in mind that your LO has had a shorter nap so will need shorter A time before the next nap.  Again, perhaps only 2.5-3 hours.  This should fall almost straight after lunch which will help with a long nap - make sure you LO eats really well and even give a milk top-up too as a temporary measure.  You know how much you want to take a nap if you have a big lunch?!

You'll hopefully get a long second nap which leaves a good 4 hour or so stretch before bedtime.  That shouldn't be too long on top of a long nap, particularly as naps in the middle of the day (anytime between about 12 and 2) are said to be more refreshing.

Kelly x

[jlmlyle]

First of all, thank you for your responses.  It is so good to be able to work this out with someone else's input.

So she could make it beyond the 2 hour mark after that last nap, but it depends on how well those first two naps went.  If they are fine and she gets 2.5-3 hours worth of napping in for the day, she could stay up longer.  But we limit that because we know that she gets OT not based on last nap to bedtime, but the fact that she has had enough waking hours for the whole day and a 7:30 bedtime seems to be the sweet spot for her.  She is temperamentally fine with a later bedtime, but will often take an hour of rolling around to settle, which I see as OT or overstimulated.  (She is textbook/angel)  I have read that with infants, wake time before bed isn't always an issue, but toddlers need a certain wake time before going to bed, so since she's almost a year, I was concerned about what we were going to do.

Kelly, I like your suggestions. I always thought she could go down earlier in the morning, but because she wasn't getting long enough naps when she was younger, I kept pushing the wake time to take a nice 1st nap.  It seemed to be very helpful for having a good 2nd nap and avoiding OT, but in this situation, I see the logic. I think I just need to adjust my thinking towards the 2:1 switch even though I hope it really doesn't happen for a while.

I think I will have to move back her first nap more gradually now that we've been pushing it forward.  Any other thoughts?