Talk me through dropping the morning sleep...

[Labella77]

DD is nearly 13 months and has a morning snooze, and an afternoon one. The morning one tends to be quite forced now around 9am, and lasts for 30 mins, if i can get her off. However if i don't try she will drop off anyway around 11 ish. If she has the 9am snooze she will then snooze for 30-1hr around 1pm, again fairly forced, when i say forced i rock her to sleep whcih can take anythign up to 30 mins to achieve.
if it's 11ish then she wont have another sleep til around 3-4 which then buggers up evening sleep, as it means she may not wake til 5!
What is the best way of merging the snoozes so she takes one big one after lunch?
Do i just stop the morning one altogether and keep her lively til after lunch?

Yes, I would skip the 9am nap then ensure lots of distraction around 11am when she naturally wants to sleep (don't take her out in pram/car if she'll fall asleep at this time). Then aim for a 12-2pm naptime (lunch at 11.30?) or a 1-3pm naptime (lunch at 12 or 12.30pm).

Personally at that age until 2 years old when she dropped her naps, I put my DD to bed at 1.30pm and always woke her by 3pm latest so she would go to sleep at 7pm.

I agree with Orissiah. DS dropped his morning nap at 11 months. It just got more and more difficult to persuade him to go to sleep! I just brought the afternoon one forward and gradually, that one after lunch nap got longer and longer. He would often sleep longer in that one nap than he did in two naps combined!

Take her out in the mornings to keep busy and get her nice and tired, then early lunch and straight down to sleep.

Dropping the morning nap didn't work for me coz LO got soooo tired that he napped really badly in the afternoon. Then he was exhausted all afternoon and kept waking up in the night. I found this baby sleep routine and have pretty much followed it exactly and it's worked brillianty up until now (21 months).

Slowly push the sleep back over the period of a week (pushing it back 15 minutes a day means that by the 5th day you've got her sleeping at 12.15ish as opposed to 11) Good Luck :)