30 min naps and EMWs - time for 1 nap?

[chuckmum]

Hi,

I'm looking for help/advice/ reassurance please!
For the last couple of months my 13 month old has been struggling with 30 min naps (particularly at nursery). For a few weeks I managed to get decent naps from him at home but now we have gone back to two naps each of 30 minutes at home. Over the past month or so his normal wake up time of 6.15/6.30 has moved to 5.30.
I know that he is not getting enough sleep (I don't think he is LSN) but we already do bedtime at 6.30 (6pm on a particularly bad day) and so I don't know what to do.
I've tried pushing his activity time but we are getting to the point that if he does have a better nap in the afternoon it is very late in the day and I don't think this helps the EW.
I've tried w2s which had some success at home but when they tried it at nursery he woke up and didn't go back!
At the moment a typical day looks like this:
WU - 5.30
S - 10.30 - 11 (tried this nap earlier and still only sleeping for 30 mins)
S - 3 - 3.30/4 (again tried earlier if showing tired signs but still maximum of 1 hour and always 30 mins at nursery)
BT - 6.30

Today he woke up at 6.15 and so I put him down at 11.15 thinking if that was a decent nap then we could try for 1 nap and a very early BT but he was really unsettled going down (usually goes down very easily) and then slept for 30 mins. I put him down at 2.30 (trying not to have the second nap too late) and he has babbled/grumbled for 45 mins but I think he has gone to sleep now.

Any suggestions gratefully received as I would really like him to have more/better sleep! He is usually quite happy during the day even in his 30 minute naps and only gets really grumbly at bath time before bed but I know it would be so much better for him to have at least one decent nap. He is teething at the moment but this seems to always be teething bless him!

Thanks xx

[trimbler]

Hiya, I suspect you're in 2-1 territory although that doesn't necessarily mean he's ready for one nap. Just out of interest, what did his day look like when he was getting longer naps at home? How are the nights? What do you do when he wakes in the morning? Get him up straight away or let him chat/fuss/doze,in his cot until a fixed time that you've decided on? Please take my suggestion with a pinch of salt, but looking at his current tendencies, you say that putting him down earlier in the morning results in the same length nap (30mins), so have you tried putting him down earlier and capping that nap shorter, say, to 20mins? Then you might find he's tired enough for a good length nap in the afternoon and be less tired for BT. This would only really work if he's able to go down quite UT in the morning - some LOs can, others can't. I personally like to stick to a fixed 'get up' time, regardless of actual wake up time, and then fix the time of the first nap. That seemed to prevent the WU time from getting too ridiculously early. Also he just seemed to cope better with shorter A times in the morning but a really short first nap meant that he was nicely tired for the pm nap. But tbh this all worked much better with DS than it has/is with DD So, bearing in mind that this is just one option and that others may chime in with alternatives, this is what DS did at around 13mo:

Wake up any time from 5.30-6.30am
Get up 6.30am
Nap 1: 9.30-9.50am
Nap 2: 1-3pm
BT: 7pm (had to push this later as he approached 1 nap, it ended up at 8pm!)

[chuckmum]

Thanks for your reply - very useful.

Our nights are usually great - goes down easily and sleeps about 11.5 hours without any waking. This week it's taken him longer to settle and the mornings are gradually getting earlier so I think the OTness is catching up. When he wakes in the morning we leave him to chat/play/grumble and only go in if he is really crying (and give milk then leave again) or at 6.15-6.30 depending how long he has been awake.

When he has good naps our day looked like this:
WU - 6-6.30
S - 10.30 - 11.30/12
S - 3.30/4 - 4.30/5
BT - 6.30 (trying to push towards 7 if good naps but never really made it consistently!)

I wanted to try a single nap to try to make it a decent one but it makes sense that he's not completely ready for it so I will try your suggestion of a short CN early in the morning and see what happens. I think he should go down as he's always a bit tired in the morning. We are going to APOP it in the car this morning on the way out.

Thank you for your help. I'll let you know what happens!

[trimbler]

Just got this, how did it go? Bear in mind it can take a while to figure out the 'best' A times and morning nap length with this approach, actually we ended up being constrained by other things which kind of made it easier as we were left with fewer variables to tweak Btw to go to one nap they usually need to be around 5h A time, or at least getting there. But some will have 2 naps one day, 1 nap the next, and so on for some time before dropping the 2nd nap completely.

[chuckmum]

I'm not quite sure! We've tried it for 3 days now with a 20 minute nap at 9am each morming then putting him down at 12.30. He goes down really easily for the 9am cat nap so that's good. The first day we had a 50 minute lunchtime nap, the second he woke after 30 mins and although my husband thought he managed to get him back down he was awake 10mins later and then today he slept for 1h 5 mins. Each afternoon we've kept him busy and put him down for an early bedtime at 6pm each night and he's managed this ok although been tired by bedtime. His wake ups have been about 5.45ish each day. This morning he woke at 4.15am but self settled reasonably quickly.

He's really struggling with his teeth so I think this might be contributing to the early wakings in the morning and from naps although we are dosing him up.

I was thinking that we should stick with this routine for a week before making any tweaks and hope his teeth settle down. I've put him down at 12.30 as this fits well with a post lunch nap at nursery.

Xx

[trimbler]

Ok, well it's always hard to tell especially with things like teething, isn't it? At least it doesn't sound worse than it was before... How do you feel he's been on waking after his nap? Do you think he needs to be pushed further beforehand, or does he wake tired and upset? You're probably right that you'll need to wait it out a bit. Have you given him time to resettle when he wakes, or gone in to reassure him and then gone out to see if he'll resettle?

[chuckmum]

I think I need some more help please!
It's now been 5 days and the lunchtime sleep hasn't lengthened past 50 mins and today it was 30 minutes and although I thought a couple of times I was going to get him back down he had other ideas!
He is still really suffering with his teeth which I know doesn't help but he's currently surviving on a total of 50 - 70minutes of daytime sleep and 11.5 hours at night. I keep trying to do early bedtime (6pm) to try to help him catch up but this is resulting in a 5.30 wake up and we haven't been able to resettle him.
He always wakes up from his nap crying (even after 2 hours) so it's hard to know if he is still tired or not. I worry about pushing him too much and ending up with an over tired mess. He is a bit grumbly during the day but with distraction he is absolutely fine. Again I think teeth aren't helping.
What do you think? Xx

[chuckmum]

So to follow on from my post above....
Today he woke at 5.15am (after a 6.30 bedtime) and I managed to get him back to sleep about 6.15am for about 30-45 mins so up about 7am. I therefore didn't put him down for his nap at 9am as it seemed too soon and we went out to soft play and he was fine. He was starting to fall asleep in the car on the way home but I kept him awake, gave some milk and had him in bed by 12 noon. He woke after 1 hour which was a bit disappointing for a 5 hour A time!
I tried to put him down for a nap at 3.30pm (very early but I didn't want a nap too late) but he grumbled/cried for 10 mins so I got him up. I've just put him down for bedtime now at 6.30pm. He was tired and a bit grumbly this afternoon but not dreadful.
So......should I persevere with one nap? I don't think he'll last from 5.30ish until 12 noon but I'm worried if I put down too early it will be too long an afternoon for him if he has a short nap. I suppose I can always offer a catnap but this gets a bit tricky with timings at nursery.
Grateful for your help. Thanks x

[trimbler]

Oh sorry been working late so only just seen this! How did the night go after that one nap, and what did you do yesterday? What a pain these teeth are! Have you been medicating for that? What happens when he wakes from a nap? He cries, and then you try to resettle him? If so, for how long? Tbh if mine are OT I expect them to struggle a bit more with sleep and tend to persevere a bit longer to get them to nap/resettle, but I guess that would depend on his temperament. Do you think you could try a bit longer? If he'd always taken shorter naps it might be different, but he used to do 2h, right? And he seems grumpy on the shorter naps?

I'd probably have done similar if I'd managed to get him back off to sleep until 7am, but I'd be surprised if he was able to handle one nap every day - then again I'm happy to be surprised But what I tend to see on here is that LOs will do one nap some days and two on others, depending on how the night went and on whether or not they had a decent lunchtime nap. The other thing you could try with the two nap routine, would be to cap the morning nap to 15mins and keep the pm nap at 12.30 or just maybe 15mins earlier; or keep the morning nap at 20mins and try the pm nap at 12.45 - ie just make a small push and see if that pm nap starts to lengthen. How would you feel about that?

[chuckmum]

Thanks for your reply.
Our nights have been the same irrespective of how much sleep he has, which I suppose is good! I've being trying to push bedtime back a bit to try to move away from the 5.30 wakings as he is sleeping for 11-11.5 hours so not technically EW (although it feels like it to us!). I know this will take a few days to have an effect. Unfortunately it has meant he is having a shorter night and waking slightly earlier each morning -5.10am this morning - but I'm hoping it will sort itself out after a couple of nights.
We are trying to balance resettling him at 5ish with not giving him too much attention at this time (previously we would leave him until at least 6.15 unless he was crying). So sometimes we go in and try and get him to settle (although this is usually unsuccessful as he is such a wriggler once awake) and sometimes we will leave him to play, babble, grumble a bit in his cot.
When he wakes he cries to get attention but then is usually awake, standing up and wanting to play. Sometimes he has little temper tantrums when you get him up but I suppose that's when he is  really tired and actually wanted to go back to sleep.
Yesterday he was at nursery so I thought it best to go back to short early nap and then try for longer at lunch. He had 35 mins at 8.40 (they are not allowed to wake him before 40 mins but he usually wakes before that - don't ask - that's the policy!) and then 50 mins at 12.45. So overall more sleep than his two 30 minute naps which has been standard since he started nursery 2 months ago.
We've never had consistent long naps - until a few months ago he would do 1h/1hr 15 min naps at home twice a day but then this dropped to mostly 30 minute naps a few weeks ago.
Today we did a short 20 minute nap at 8.50am and were going to put him down at 12.45 but he was very tired and so he went down at 12.35 so we will see what happens.
Thanks xx