For the days she's not at nursery I try to get at least one 2 hour nap, but it needs to be a contact nap. Obviously the nursery staff can't do this. She wakes around 7.30am and they offer her nap around 11 - 11.30, but she only ever does half an hour. Then they can't ever manage to get her to do a second nap (which I understand, I often struggle with the second one), so she often goes from waking at about 12pm, to bedtime at 7 - 7.15pm. So far it hasn't affected her night sleep (she sleeps so brilliantly through the night), and she's in a great mood when she comes home from nursery. But yesterday, a day she wasn't at nursery, she slept in the pram for almost two hours, which she NEVER does, ever. She also woke up an hour later than usual that morning, so I'm wondering if she was catching up on sleep. Does anyone think eventually she'll nap longer at nursery just due to sheer exhaustion? Of course I don't want it to happen that way, but I'm back at work and I can't really instruct the staff to do a two hour contact nap.
She's always been like this with her naps, and aside from CIO, I've tried everything to lengthen them. Like, anything you can think of: sleep suit, white noise, blackout curtains, Ferber, wake to sleep, crib hour, lengthening wake windows, shortening them, a set schedule, following her lead. I ended up getting very stressed and obsessing over the perfect schedule and realised it wasn't worth my tears and gave in to the contact nap. But like I said, often she is going about six hours between waking from her nap to bedtime, and I'm just hoping this is safe to do for a baby her age.
I have noticed in different countries the advice varies - I usually post on reddit which has a lot of American users, and their general consensus was that I really need to get her to nap again in the afternoon or bad things will happen. I find the UK audience pretty much say, you know your baby, not all babies need so much nap sleep.