Hello all :) looking to hear some of your experiences and opinions please.
My daughter has recently turned 3 years old. We have always had issues with her sleep but we got to the point where getting her to go to sleep at night took 2.5 hours, no matter what. However, she was always really needing that one nap (she would fall asleep easily then and sleep 2 hours!). So we decided to slowly cut that nap out so that she would not take any naps, in hopes that this would get her sleep pressure up.
For the first two weeks, things were going well. She would fall asleep within ten minutes and sleep for at least 11 hours. However she has been extremely miserable (like - EXTREMELY) all day so following some advice, we offer her a nap during the day. We make sure that we cap her nap and so she always wakes up around noon. Her bedtime is approx 7pm.
However, no matter when bedtime is, she will a) always wake up at 5.30am, terribly tired, unable to go back to sleep; and b) she is miserable during the day and will fall asleep before 10am.
So what on earth to do here? If she does nap, she will not fall asleep until 10pm at night. So overall she doesn’t sleep more than she does without the nap.
But if she doesn’t nap, she still wakes very very early and it becomes a vicious cycle. The nap length does not seem to matter.
many thanks in advance!