DS is 2.5 now, and has reached the point where he doesn't want a nap during the day. Well, fine. Frustrating that it's come along at the same time as the new baby, but oh well.
The trouble is, although he denies that he wants one, both DP (my carer) and I can see that, really, he still needs the sleep, because he gets very cranky, and usually ends up conking out around mid afternoon, which plays havoc with his bedtime routine. There's also the issue that from 11am ('naptime') until he inevitably falls asleep (anything up to 3-4pm) he's by turns cheery and cranky, one minute happily playing, the next demanding a nap, and when we lie him down he abruptly changes his mind.
He has a dummy for bedtime and naptime, and tbh, it's mostly the dummy that he actually wants, but we're only allowing it if he actually looks like he's going to sleep. I'd love to ditch it altogether, but I'm not sure I can handle the stress given that DD is only 4wks old, and I'm BFing, and therefore knackered.
So, this is turning out to be a lot longer than I'd planned, but what do you suggest? If we tell him, "Ok,well don't have a nap then," he gets crankier and crankier until he puts out his routine (which means he goes to bed later, wakes up later, and is generally worse the next day unless we have a massive amount of activity to exhaust him), and if we try and make him have a nap, we have ages of frustrated fidgeting, crying and tantrums because he just wants to mess about and generally stay awake. We can't put him up in his cot during the day easily because we're on three floors and his room is up two flights of stairs, so he has to actually fall asleep downstairs.
This morning we have had many tears and tantrums lasting about an hour because the television went off for naptime (I'm sticking to this; what with my pregnancy issues and the new baby he's been watching far too much TV recently and I need to remedy it), he wanted to sleep one minute, so DP lay on the sofa next to him, then he was up and about wanting the TV, toys, a cuddle, a nap, no nap, a nap if he had his dummy, then to play with toys with his dummy (dummy was removed), then... arg.
He's now playing with his toys. Fine at the moment, but he did this yesterday, and got very cranky at about 1:30, which lasted until 3pm when he slept. Arg!!