Hey,
Just wondering if I could get some advice on my 17mo DS who has been going through the 2-1 transition for a while. We attempted it before Christmas and then came down with a really bad ear infection and cold so tried again early January. So far it seems to be working and he is doing better and better each day in terms of not being really OT or grumpy and we are finally getting our happy little boy back which is great. The 2-1 transition has been a long road for us and going on for months on end, as it hit along with molars coming in (ouch!) and SA when I went back to work when he turned 1.
The main difficulty we still have is that his naps are not consistently lengthening out. He usually does around 1hr 5 mins to 1 hr 15 mins for a nap in the middle of the day (midday), and then we put him to bed at 6.30pm which seems to have held off OT for the most part. He will occasionally throw in a 1hr 30/40 min nap so I know he can do longer but he doesn't seem to be doing longer naps over the last 6 weeks or so, they are just sticking at around the same time. Occasionally we get 50 minute naps, perhaps once a week or a fortnight.
Our usual day looks like this:
WU - anywhere between 6 and 7am
Nap - 12 or 12:15 (see above for times)
Lunch
BT - 6.30pm
So where am I going wrong?! Should I be pushing him out longer and doing lunch first perhaps? He isn't a hungry baby and rarely gets fussy for food, altho the last couple of days he has been a little more hungrier. I've experimented with putting him down later, especially as in the last week he has woken up later in the mornings, so put him down just before 1pm on Monday and he slept for exactly the same length of time as normal! He doesn't wake happy and chatting in his cot which is how he wakes in the morning now and how he used to wake when he was on a good 2 nap routine. He has always been able to handle really long A times in the morning.
My other difficulty is that about once or twice a week we are getting a NW that can last anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours. He doesn't do well with teething at night and sometimes it is clear that it is teething and he just screams for hours on end and nothing we do or give him really works except getting our cat upstairs which seems to help for some bizarre reason! And whereas he used to be able to SS at night brilliantly and we never really had to ever go in, and if we did, all we had to do was pick him up, quick cuddle, resettle and out the room in 10 minutes or so. Now he screams if you leave before he has gone back to sleep. However for naps and BT, he gets himself to sleep fine and we are never in the room. I don't want to AP at night but the long NW have scarred me a little as this has been going on for about 3 or 4 months now.
So...any advice? Is he in a UT/OT loop? Should I be pushing out the nap and doing lunch first? Any advice would be amazing xx
