12 month old wanting to drop her morning nap

[pamelat]

but she is then too tired to make it until lunch.

DD is almost 12 months and starts nursery in a couple of weeks.

Nursery drop will be 830am. Normally about 9/930am she had a nap. She has been very difficult to get back down in the mornings for a few weeks (and I think they drop a morning nap at about 12 months?????) Some days she has it, others not (I always try ).

On the days that she does not have the nap (her choice) then she is shattered by 11am and struggles to eat her lunch. By 12 she is fast asleep (normally 1 or 130pm if she has a morning nap).

There are a few problems with this

1. She does not eat much lunch as she is too tired.
2. She wakes about 2pm instead of 3pm because of going down an hour earlier, and then really struggles to get to her 630pm bed time and is very grumpy by 4pm.

So (and I know everyone does everything their own way but have been sticking loosely to a certain routine since she was 6 months old)

Do I introduce a 4pm ish afternoon nap?
Do I feed her lunch after her big 2 hour nap

Or do I leave her to sort herself out with time? At a certain age do they suddenly have more energy and need less day time sleep?

Am a bit anxious as the nursery routine is no nap, sleep 12-2 (as she seems to be doing at the moment) but by the time I collect her at 5pm she will be in melt down stage and incredibly grumpy. I feel that by going back to work (3 days a week) I will only get the grumpy side to my DD?!

pamelat - my dd was also a regular morning napper. I got so stressed at the thought of her going without at nursery - but she made it through. I think nursery is so exciting and busy that they keep going. On bad days dd would nap for a max of half an hour in the day - so I would put her to bed slightly early.

You might find that your dd goes back to morning naps for a while to catch up on sleep from nursery days - dd did this - she'd wake at about 7am then nap for up to 3 hours from 9am, with maybe a brief nap again at 3pm.

She's 18mo now and has only just properly dropped her morning nap in the last few weeks.

DS2 is doing exactly this, we play it by ear each day. We watch for sleep cues, if we see em in the morning he goes to bed and has his lunch when he gets up. If he's still up at 10 he gets a snack and a drink. Some mornings he doesn't have a nap at all but will then have a good sleep in the afternoon instead. He's starting nursery 2 days a week, 2 hours each morning initially from next week so we figure he'll naturally drop that morning nap soon anyway. This is exactly the pattern we followed with ds1. You might find the new stimulating environment keeps her going so that she comes home, has tea then off to bed.

Thank you.
This morning she had a 45 minute nap (she did protest but once she had gone we had to even wake her up!) Now I have been trying for over an hour to get her to have a lunch nap. I know she is shattered but she just wont go.
Sometimes life is easier without that morning nap but this morning I wanted to go back to bed with my cup of tea and some toast!

oooo never waking a sleeping baby unless you actually have to leave the house the 4pm power nap is also a godsend on days when he's really really fought it, by then he usually conks and then we just make loads of noise around the house about tea time so he wakes up 'naturally' and he's still usually ready for bed again about 6.30

nightmare day today, I can't win.

SHe went down for her morning nap and I decided to see how long she would have naturally without me waking her.

I admit to being a little bit persuaded by the boots online toy sale where I got carried away and then the site crashed and lost everything .

Anyway an hour and a half later she wakes (its now 11am)

We go out for lunch with some baby friends. 1pm she seems tired. We come home.

2pm I put her down. She plays for an hour in her cot and then screams.

So far she has not slept at all, I am never letting her sleep for as long as she likes in the morning again, boots sale or no sale! I am shattered.

Don't worry, you're both finding your feet and there won't be many nightmare days.

From about 14-18 months, we started off with a morning nap and very late afternoon nap (too late!) and ended up with dd having a single nap immediately after lunch, about 12pm. She was often tired, and yours is still young, she may still go for morning naps every so often, don't worry, the routine will find itself. The single afternoon nap was always a lot longer, 2 hours, rather than 1 hour twice, and this has advantages and disadvantages - mainly advantages.

I also lost the basket of stuff in the Great Boots Crash.

This is what I did with dd when she started showing signs of dropping the nap (at about the same age)

Gave her a decent snack and some milk and then put her down for one big sleep at around 11.30-12 am. Then gave her another snack when she woke up (so she was effectively getting two mini lunches rather than a main one). Sometimes she'd have a 15 minute power nap at 4 ish if we were out and about, but if she didn't, I would give her tea early and start bedtime at 5.30 ish (and drag it out) so she was asleep by 6.30

The main nap gradually got later and later and within a few weeks, she was lasting long enough to have lunch before she slept and her bed times also got later.

She now does 1-3 pm nap and bed at 7.30 and has been since she was around 14 months

Thank you, have you seen that you now can't even view the sale on Boots, they just tell you go in to the store.

Back to DD. DD will happily go to sleep at 1130am/12 ish for almost 2 hours if I don't let her have any morning nap at all.

Maybe I will make lunch time 2pm, fits better with my eating times and plans anyway.

DD never gets past 630pm but waking at 630am is ok with me/us.

Thank you