24 mo old playing at night in crib for hours-- are naps are done?!

[tomatomama]

Our 24 month old PLAYs and PLAYs for hours at night before going to sleep, which ends up being 9-10pm, then wakes up at 6am. Then she is so tired in the day that she still sleeps for her 3 hour nap. This playing at night has been getting worse and worse -- I am wondering if it means I should stop napping her -- she is just not getting tired at bedtime and then wakes up at the same time every morning regardless of her bedtime.
Advice?!?

[EloysH]

I am finding a simliar thing happen after 3 hour nap for our 22 month old.

 LO will play for an hour or two extra before finally falling asleep.  I feel it is UT, so I cut the nap to 2 hours for 7 days with mixed results.  TO good results was that he now falls asleep at night within 15 mins, no more playing.  But he has started EW. 

Anway, just today I let him sleep 3 hours for his nap and he played in the cot from 8-9:30 pm before falling asleep.   Now I am going to decide whether to cut the nap to 1.5 hours.   Its a hard thing to do though as we also have ew's of 5:30am and he;s now so OT.

[clazzat]

At 24 months I would say that 3 hours is too long for a nap and is probably causing the playing at night.  Having said that, I don't think I would cut it too drastically just yet - maybe try 2.5h for a little bit to see if that makes any difference.

We went through the same thing with dd1 when she was about 29 months - she would take a great lunchtime nap (about 2h15) and then mess about at bedtime, leading to OT EWs from going to sleep too late.  We started out by pushing bedtime later and cutting the nap dramatically (to 1h30) and things got much worse - she got into an OT spiral that was really difficult to fix.  After a lot of trial and error, we ended up with 1h45 lunchtime nap and a 12.5h day (so bedtime is 15-20 mins later than it was when this all started).

So, somewhere within all this rambling I'm trying to say: I would cut the nap a bit but don't cut too much too fast.