5-10 minute 'power naps'

[ecwinters]

Hi
I was speaking to a friend yesterday whose baby is transitioning from 2 naps to 1.  She has been taking advice from a sleep consultant, so I was asking her some questions.  What she's been advised to do is set a nap time in the middle of the day and give her baby a 5 minute 'power nap' sometime in the morning to keep it going until the main nap.  I think if her DD wakes early she's been told to do 10 minutes but no more. 

Has anyone tried (successfully?) this length of nap?  I was wondering whether this might be useful for DS to help get him through from his morning nap (which we are trying to push out slowly) to bedtime.  It might help us stop making bedtime ridiculously early.  But she was told that these short naps wouldn't work in the afternoons...is this correct?  I have no idea why not, but there might be a reason? 

If anyone has any thoughts then it would be really interesting to know!

Thanks

[creations]

My DS wouldn't have done a power nap like that in the afternoon when we moved to 1 nap it was kind of cold turkey and lots of W2S through his 1 nap to avoid OT wake ups.  However I wanted to post as I've seen lots of routines where people have done a long first nap and have gradually capped the second nap down until it was something like 5 or 10 mins and still maintained BT. I think really it depends on the LO, some will do it, some won't.  Mine would not have kicked off big time if I'd tried to nap him for 10 mins in the morning too so neither would have worked for us - although when he chose to have a micro nap in the car for say 3 mins it would effect our routine that day it's just I couldn't have planned on those in our routine as they were pretty random.

[Scottishmummy]

Both of mine have done well with a 10-15 min morning nap (around 9.45) then a long nap after lunch during this transition. We got EW if we tried this as a pm nap...then again DD is now EW with this micro morning nap..so not sure if it is helping or hindering us now!

[ecwinters]

Thanks both of you!  I'm glad other people have tried the very short PM nap as it seems the only solution at the moment for DS.  He's not reliable at sleeping for a long length (i.e. 1.5 hours) of time so I really don't want to risk giving him a tiny nap in the morning which would reply on him doing a lovely long lunchtime sleep - it would happen on about 1 out of 3 days!
DS doesn't sleep in the car so at least I don't have to worry about him dozing off!
Thanks both of you.

[creations]

If it works out for you, you can be the micro-nap in the afternoon "expert"