Hi there
Wondered if anyone has any ideas for me... the 2 to 1 switch had gone really well and now we are in a pickle!
Katie is 14.5 months and went down to one nap about a month ago. We did the transition by slowly moving the morning nap later and having this as her "main" nap, with a short catnap in her buggy in the late afternoon. This was becuase her morning nap was always her "best" nap, and she has always done best with longer A times in the morning, and shorter A times as the day goes on. The morning nap had got as late as 11:45 or 12 noon, with her sleeping for 1.5-2hrs, and then she (not surprisingly) started refusing the catnap. So we were then doing 7am get up, nap 12-2 (ish), bed 7pm, which worked fine for about 2 weeks - no NW and no problems at all.
HOWEVER... she then got a cold and the clocks changed the same weekend and it completely messed everything up - she got OT, with NW, EW, and taking 1-2hrs to settle for sleep every night. And then the lunchtime nap got shorter and shorter... yep, classic pattern of OT!!
So I reinstated the second nap - and her cold got better, and the NW have almost resolved, but we are still getting EW and we are still on two naps. And it can be really difficult to get her down at night. For the last two weeks we have therefore been doing something like this:
- Wake up anywhere between 6 and 7am (one morning it was 5am but we will try and forget that one...)
- Nap at 12 ish (slightly earlier if she seems tired, but trying to fix this at around 12 noon in case moving it earlier contributes to EW) but she usually only sleeps 1hr 15 or 1hr 30
- Take her for a walk in the buggy between 4pm and 5pm and usually she will sleep- I wake her up after 30 mins
- bedtime 7:30pm if she had a catnap, much earlier if she didn't
So she's getting about 1.5-2hrs of daytime sleep, plus 10-11hrs night time sleep, which seems a bit low and is a lot lower than what she was getting before she got OT.
So - any ideas what I can do to tweak what we are doing? I can't work out whether she's OT or UT at bedtime, but it's very unlike her to be so hard to settle at night. And I am concerned that she is not getting enough night time sleep - hey, I need nearly 10hrs at night!!
Katie is fairly spirited and so shows very little in the way of tired signs, so I do usually do things by the clock instead of by cues. When our routine goes "off" it can be very hard to work out which way I need to move it to get back on track.
Bryony
