Losh - what a great night
Will be interesting to see how the rest of your day goes. When our DS was taking a 1h morning nap, our day officially started at 06:30 and his afternoon nap was around 2pm, also with a 4pm cut-off. His morning nap was half an hour earlier than yours, but it doesn't seem to matter too much for him exactly what time that morning nap is, as long as it's the 'right' length and that the afternoon nap happens at the 'right' time. So see how it goes... I always found that gradual changes worked best - for us, it's taken almost 6 months to get from a 1h 10min capped nap to a 15-20min capped nap
How flexible are the nursery about nap times? Can you ask them to give him naps at certain times, or does he have to follow the nursery schedule? Although our childminder's very good at aiming for naps at the times we suggest, if the timing's out a bit then we also notice the repercussions! However we did manage to work towards a nap routine that would work with the childminder as well as for our son, by the time he had started there.
I think with resettling you're doing really well. In my mind by this stage, if they can do it some of the time but not at other times, there are probably other factors involved, such as routine (which you're working on) or teething etc - which I'm afraid you can't do much about other than give meds, teething gels etc. I often found that sleep would suddenly get worse and I couldn't work out why - until I felt his gums or noticed him sticking his fingers in his mouth all the time!
As for coughing, I used to be quite worried by this and thought that he'd had a really disrupted nap so brought the next nap/BT forward to compensate. However this would usually backfire, and when my mum told me that we all used to just cough in our sleep and not actually wake up, I decided to try giving his usual A times after a nap/sleep like that. To my surprise, that worked much better than trying to compensate
Of course you may still need to allow for him being more tired if he's ill, but if it's just a tickly cough (often due to a runny nose when they're teething - when they lie down it drips down the back of their throats) then you may not need to do anything differently.
Before I know it he will be a whacking great teenager and I will be having trouble getting the blighter out of his bed!
Lol this thought often comes to me too - so hard to imagine at the moment though!
Amom526 - I wonder whether teeth may be bothering him, especially if he doesn't have any yet. They can take ages to come through though... Has he given you any other hints about teething, e.g. biting everything, sticking fingers into his mouth, drooling more, changes in poos, red cheeks, changes in eating? Have you felt his gums? Teething aside, when did you last cut his morning nap back or push out the A till BT? If he doesn't seem so tired then it's possible you may want to do one of these things... IIWM I'd try gradually pushing back BT first and see what happens, since he did 3.5h after a 40min nap in the morning but then only 3h after an almost 2h afternoon nap. What do you think? We've always tried to stick to a consistent get-up time, which has usually worked out eventually. If he seems tired when you get him up in the morning, I think the trick is to give him enough morning nap time not to get too tired before the afternoon nap, but not so much that he catches up on all his lost sleep from the night - you want him to do that at a slightly earlier BT, IYSWIM? I've often found that I could give DS an extra 5mins on the morning nap if I felt he needed it, and then keep the afternoon nap at the same time, so he was a little bit caught up on sleep, but not completely.
As for us, we're definitely in OT land at the moment! I think we're getting quite close to dropping the morning nap, but we won't be able to do that every day until he can manage at least 5.5 - 6h A time in the morning, to fit in with our childminder's routine. And that would require us to get him up half an hour later, if he can then take breakfast with the childminder (3 days a week). So I'm kind of hoping that will happen around the clock change, which would be the easiest way of moving WU time from 6:30 to 7am
For now, I think we have 2 possible sustainable routines:
(i) up: 6:30 nap 1: 9:30 - 9:50 nap 2: 1 - 3 BT 7:30pm [when at childminders, it's tricky to get nap 2 much before 1pm]
(ii) up: 6:30 nap 1: 9:30 - 9:45 nap 2: 12:30 - 2:30 BT 7pm [when at home]
We've had recent success with both of these, however (i) doesn't always seem to give him enough night-time sleep. But then (ii) can leave him so well rested the next morning that he either struggles to get to sleep for the morning nap or just does 10mins before waking up refreshed and happy... but last time that happened, we didn't quite get the rest of the day right for him and we're still suffering the consequences! So to those of you who've btdt, what signs did you look out for to start trying 1 nap days? I had thought we'd just go with his nap refusals (we had a couple just before him getting ill over Christmas), but I'm wondering if we ought to just try it some time... Last week, his childminder gave him 30min morning naps but kept the afternoon nap at 1pm. She said he was sleeping really well, but the problem was that he just couldn't get to sleep until 8pm at BT, so that was 5h A time, which was ok at first but only gave him 10.5h at night, which just isn't enough for him...
