Is my 13 month old heading towards 1 nap a day?

[Dollopsmum]

My baby girl has never been the best at napping and her pattern seems to change just as I have got used to it.  She is incredibly good at getting to sleep when I put her down it's just that she often wakes during naps.  For the last 2 or 3 months she has started to more and more frequently only take a short morning nap, 30 - 60mins and more recently nearer the 30 min mark.  She then usually only takes an hour and a bit in the afternoon, ever couple of weeks she will do a mega 2 hour plus nap in the afternoon.  However, for the last 3 weeks she has been waking 35mins into her afternoon nap, crying very briefly and then going back to sleep.  The last week she has woken after 45mins and not got back to sleep so had little more than 1 hour 15 for the whole day!  She hasn't seemed overly grumpy when this has happened though.  She continues to sleep well at night 7 - 7.  Just wondering if I should try cutting the morning nap and seeing if she will then take a nice long solid consistent afternoon nap?  Thanks.

[creations]

Hi there
Sounds like you have a good plan. I would start her morning nap at the same time if she is still going down well without fussing, then cap it 10-15 mins earlier.  Leave the afternoon nap at the normal time initially as the A time will already be increased due to that morning nap ending sooner plus she's had less sleep, hopefully this will help her sleep better for her afternoon nap.  After a week or so you should be able to see what effect it has had and decide if you ned to do any further tweaking. It could be that you then move her afternoon nap 15 mins later for example to make her that extra bit tired so she can transition from one sleep cycle to the next.

Mine dropped to one nap at 11-12 months, some do, so it is not too unusual at 13 months to be moving towards this.
hope this helps

[Dollopsmum]

Thanks, given that she is only napping for half an hour in the morning this means cutting it down to a 15minute nap? Not sure if it would be more disruptive to wake her after 15 minutes rather than not put her down at all.

[MasynSpencerElliotte]

If you think it would work better going cold turkey to one nap is an option too. I did this with all 3 of my kids and it worked out well for them all (but they are all somewhat spirited and were not bothered by some OT while adjusting to one nap). I am fairly certain that we did the nap around 11 ish to start and slowly pushed it back, but my kids all had a longer am nap and a pm catnap so we were skipping the catnap and pushing the am nap later.

[creations]

Thanks, given that she is only napping for half an hour in the morning this means cutting it down to a 15minute nap? Not sure if it would be more disruptive to wake her after 15 minutes rather than not put her down at all.

Yes it would be just 15 mins and it might sound like a lot of bother preparing her for sleep only to wake her again. As Heidi said you can go directly to 1 nap but do keep in mind this can be very difficult for some LOs.  Heidi's all managed really well.  Mine did not.
My DS had a lovely 2hr nap (1st nap but as he liked very long first A time it wasn't very early) when on 2 naps.  Cut to 1 nap though and his 2hr nap was destroyed, it went to 20 mins OT naps with screaming and me spending ages trying to tell him to go back to sleep as he couldn't get through the day on 20 mins only and would by then refuse a second nap.  I had to put quite a lof of effort in to get that 2hr nap - what had looked simple turned out not to be, yk?

So it is your choice, you know your baby best - and sometimes there is no choice at all as baby just decides what they are going to do and you have to do your best around that!  I ended up using W2S every 20 mins throughout DS's nap to get him to 2hrs.  That was successful, I only had to go in for 2 mins each time to see him through those OT wake ups into the next cycle and eventually he settled back to his 2hr nap.

[Dollopsmum]

THanks, i will see how it goes.  Tried W2S quite a lot in the early days but gave up as it never worked.

[creations]

I also tried W2S when mine was younger, for some EWs.  It was not successful at that point but for the 2-1 nap drop it was a life saver.