How to go from two to one naps with 11 month old?

[SharkSkinThing]

Hi - yet another sleep related plea for help from me..help!!

My DS is showing all the signs of wanting to drop his morning nap but I'm not entirely sure how to get him through until he would take his pm nap.

He tends to wake at 5/5.30am having had 10/10.5 hours solid sleep, and whilst will have a morning nap around 9/9.30am for up to an hour, he then becomes apocalyptic with rage if I put him down for his pm nap. He used to have 1.5 - 2 hours in the afternoon.

Come bed time he is soooo tired he has quite a long boo-hoo before dropping off. Very upsetting.

Do I just try and keep him awake until say 11am, give him his lunch, and then put him down around 11.30/12? And then push that a little later over a few days, until he's napping around 12.30?

This would,of course, be happening, as I am due back to work in a few weeks!

Thanks for any advice. xx

A couple of ideas - you could try cutting morning nap down to half an hour or so, and then hopefully he'd go down for his pm nap, or try putting him down for his pm nap earlier - sounds strange but his meltdown might be down to over-tiredness - coming up to the first birthday they tend to be learning and doing new things so much that they get tired out. My 2 year old is like this now and back to sleeping 14 hours out of every 24 again because he's so tired learning how to jump, all his new words etc!!

My DS always had his biggest nap in the morning so I pushed that later and later until it became the middle of the day and his only nap. Whilst he struggled in the in-between bit, I made his bedtime earlier to compensate, so 12 or 12.30 naptime and 6.30 bedtime.

HTH :)

how old is ds?

Thanks Lozario

I did cut the morning nap down to 30 mins, and it made no difference! But I agree it could be over tiredness, and he is on the move a lot and generally quite 'busy' so that all fits in.

So if I pushed his morning nap later and he only did half an hour, would you still put him down at the same time for the pm nap?

Because he wakes early, if he ended up having a big nap from say 9am - 11am, he's still got a helluva lot of day still to get through!

He's 11 months, btw.

Hi SharkSkin

I did things slightly differently to Lozario but with same final result so just to offer another potential solution - with both my boys I pushed the morning nap back to 9:30, and let them have literally a catnap of 10-15 minutes but no longer That way, they got through to lunch without descending into screaming overtiredness, but were still tired enough, IYSWIM, to go back down after lunch (around 1pm) for about 1.5 hours.

If I remember correctly they were about 14m when they managed to completely drop the morning nap, and from that point the lunchtime nap moved slightly earlier i.e. to about 12:30, and they would then do a solid 2 hours. As they got older, the lunchtime nap moved nearer to 1pm (DS2 is 20m and generally goes down sometime between 12:45 and 1pm now).

HTH

15m is usually the two to one nap watershed although obvs some start earlier. At a year, the rule of rhumb is eleven hours at night and 2-2.5 during the day.

My first thought is try earlier bedtime (lights out 1830) & restrict morning nap to an hour max with lunch nap starting at 1300.

If that doesn't work after a consistent week, then migrate the morning nap to lunchtime like you suggest and try a quiet time in the afternoon.