I am wondering would it be better to have a slightly shorter a time in the morning and get 1 hours nap (what should the z time be roughly?) and then get a longer afternoon nap or should I keep going with the morning nap getting later and let him have 2 hours and then push that afternoon nap until it disappears?
This depends on a few things. There are pros and cons with each approach:
Long AM/Short PM
- You get another chance for a long nap if the first on goes to pot.
- You can just reduce the length of the second nap by capping it and there's less juggling around of A times to achieve that.
- It can get tricky in a few months time when he starts to refuse the second nap.
Short AM / Long PM
- If you want him to take an UT short nap, you have to have a child who will go to sleep UT - not every child will do that and the ones who do it at 8mo don't always continue doing it.
- By doing a shorter than ideal A time to put LO down UT, you can open yourself up to long happy NWs and EWs
- Usually the short AM nap can just be capped shorter and shorter until it disappears whilst the PM nap time stays reasonably static.
Either way will work. It is quite normal at this age to have one long nap and a shorter nap to keep your day to ~13hr max. The one thing I would suggest strongly is to keep at least one nap that LO can sleep as long as he likes (still cap at 2ish hours) so he doesn't get in the habit of never sleeping more than 1hr, for example, as that can cause issues when you get to one nap.