Short first nap

[Redhorses]

My little one is almost 10m old. She's a generally good sleeper but not the best napper. She's been on 2 naps for a while and used to do 1 hour 10 then roughly 50 mins to an hour for nap 2. I know that can be normal, especially since she sleeps 11 hours through the night, however she's started to do a short first nap with waking 30-40 minutes and being quite awake. I think she's too young for one nap only but do I extend her first wake window past 3 hours in hope that she will nap better? She's started waking earlier in the morning too so I'm unsure how to keep dragging out her wake windows when her naps don't get any better? She naps in the cot and doesn't generally do contact or pram naps unless she really has to (eg holiday). I have a terrible hv (I'm on the 4th one and only seen them twice - all their doing) so being a ftm I am a bit lost at this stage!

I should add that she isn't really learning new tricks. Not walking but has been crawling, pulling up and cruising for months now. She also has loads of teeth and this isn't her usual when teething.

Around this age we did 30 mins in the morning and 1.5 hours in the afternoon and it worked well - we kept cutting the morning nap back until we got to 15 mins for a bit, and then got rid of it completely around 13/14 months and went to one nap!

They start being able to be awake for longer at this age. Lengthening the nap will give you less sleep at night so you have to choose which you prefer.

Mine only did an hour in the morning and 20-30 minutes in the afternoon. If he went over 1.5 hours of daytime sleep, night time was fucked and he would get up at 5am.

I think 30-40 minutes for the first nap is pretty common at this age. And yes, there's an awkward stage where they aren't quite ready to drop to one nap, but their wake windows are getting longer, so you have to either push back bedtime or bring forward waking up time in order to fit three wake windows in the day.

Also go on the child rather than the books on when to drop to one nap – DD2 dropped to one at 10 months. DD1 should have dropped to one nap at about the same again, but all the books said it was far too early, so we spent a month trying all sorts of things to get her to nap before tossing the advice and going to one nap.

Thank you all so much for this!! I had no idea! I'll look at capping the naps. It's so hard to know what the best thing to do for her. She is very active and I do sometimes wonder if I didn't put her to her cot to sleep would she ever actually sleep!?

Short first nap is perfect. You want the big nap after lunch because that’s the one that stays after the morning nap is dropped. I’d say ideally the first nap is 45 minutes but 30-40 minutes is close enough. If they’re still asleep at the 1 hour mark I’d wake them. Put down for the second nap about 4 hours after they’re up from the first one and aim for that to be 1.5-2 hours. You’d probably drop to 1 nap at around 12-15 months so likely not quite there yet but they are all different and it sounds like she’s starting that transition if the first nap is shortening.