Should I drop her nap? 2.9 year old

[Gina M]

OK, my DD will go through sleep phases - good ones and bad ones, and now we are in a bad one again. I am going to ride it out for another week to see if it stops, but I think I know what is going on. However, I'd love some feedback.

My DD is  2.9 yrs old - and still a good napper, but now not sleeping so well at night. If we have a day where we skip a nap, she almost always will fall asleep in the car, so it seems to me she still needs it, BUT........

For starters our routine was like this:

7:30am wake
1:30-3:30 nap
8:30/9:00pm - bed

We always put her to bed at 8:30 and sometimes she is asleep by 8:31, other times she plays for a while and goes to sleep around 9. She wakes at 7:30/8:00am


Lately she has been going to sleep around 10pm! It takes her forever to fall asleep!!! Wants water, wants a blanky, a toy, wants to come downstairs and play, etc, etc. And then she is up at 6am! Only 8 hours of sleep? HUH? This is why I want to take away the nap.

YES, I have tried shortening the nap - and that is a disaster. She is  SO cranky when woken from her nap. Usually it results in a 20 min meltdown, and then has several more. She actually does  better with no nap than with a short one. We just do an early bed time.

I want to transfer her day sleep to night time.

Thoughts?

[Mom to M&M]

Instead of waking her from a deep sleep at home, how does she do with a car or stroller catnap? My DD used to be a BEAR to wake from a crib nap but she'd wake easily after 30-45 minutes in the car (really just had to turn off the engine or at most open the car door or window)...

[Gina M]

She will not fall asleep in the stroller and has to be in the car for 20 minutes at least to fall asleep. I am not really in the mood to drive her around everyday. I live in a place with cold weather and lots of hills, so the roads will be icey in a month!

Usually when we skip her nap it is because we are out all day at a family event and when we drive back home she'll  fall asleep in the car. I can;t tell you how many times she fall asleep in the car as we pull up our road! ARGH. I usually will then sit in the car  for 20 min, then get her. And yep, we get the meltdown then too.

[clazzat]

Could she be OT?  When we go through bad sleep phases with dd1 it tends to be triggered by being OT - a missed nap or a too-exciting day - and it takes us a little while to get back on track.  I have had a number of times when I have wondered if she is ready to give up her nap, starting at about 2.5yo, but she's still napping now at nearly 4!  Do you know if your dd has always been high/low sleep needs?  If she has always been high sleep needs, then I would think this is possibly a bit early to be dropping the nap and it might be a developmental thing which you need to ride out.  Could you try an early nap for a few days - see if she will sleep earlier and then keep bedtime around the same time so that the afternoon A is a bit longer and she is more likely to fall asleep quickly.

If you do think she is low sleep needs and ready to drop the nap, could you try alternating nap and no-nap days while she goes through the transition?  It's a good idea at this stage to start looking at total weekly sleep rather than just sleep in a 24h period - so maybe she needs 1h nap a day but 2h every other day would work for her, iyswim?

[Gina M]

Makes sense. I am going to just ride it out for another week to see what happens, but I wanted to be prepared if I need to drop the nap. The every other day seems like a good idea to do if I need to go that route.
YES, often times when she reaches a new level of awareness or gets a toy that she just adores, sleep is a mess until the novelty wears off!