I see from other threads that for 6 months A time can be as much as 2h 30.
or even 2:45-3hr though I suspect not 3hr for your LO since she's been pretty content with 1.5hr as recently as a week ago.
She still seems to need a 90 minute awake time first thing in the morning and gets quite grotty at the 90 minute mark.
She's very used to it - she's been doing it for half her life. Babies can get into the habit of acting tired because they're aware this is their normal sleep time when they're not actually tired. Sleepy cues can also signal that its time to move to another activity at this age.
I’ve been extending second A time towards the 2 hour mark but she’s being v difficult to settle then short naps.
This can happen for a few different reasons - sometimes LO is OT because they're used to napping at an earlier time and will nap 30mins. Sometimes LO is UT having pushed through the previous nap time but not made it to an appropriate A time and this manifests in a 45min nap.
Given her A time is so short for her age what increments should I extend it in? And what A time should I be aiming for??
I think you should aim for 2:30-2:45 initially. WRT how you do that, there are a couple of options:
- Fix the routine in one big jump of 1hr A time which will result in some OT nap wakings that you can probably resettle and all should be sorted in a week or so though you may need to do another increase to 2:45 to get there. This option does have some OT involved and you have to stick with it or your days can get very messy very quickly.
- Increase A time by 15mins every 3-4 days and you should be just about caught up to where she needs to be in 4-5 weeks. This option runs the risk of being very complex with OT/UT loops establishing and patterns not being reliable to tweak routine plus given she's difficult to settle for naps at ~2hr, probably a lot of nap refusal.
- Somewhere in the middle of the road is to do one big jump of 30mins in A time, hold it there for 3-4 days then increase by 15mins every 4-7 days if necessary. This runs both risks stated above.