Skipping naps

[mower]

My 21 ds used to have around 4 naps per day and sleep for 12 hours at night time with one feed. Ds now refuses to have his nap around 5ish which means he is going four hours during the afternoon without a nap. This makes him very grizzly come around six at night and he no longer enjoys his bath or his massage before bed. Don't want to put him to bed any earlier as this would mean him waking earlier in the morning. Since he has been missing this nap he has also started waking more times during the night. Can anyone suggest how I can make the evenings less grizzly and get ds to not wake up so much during the night?

Have you tried a slightly earlier bedtime? Like you I am always reluctant to put ds to bed earlier than usual as I always worry about earlier mornings but tbh I generally haven't found this to be the case. IME by stretching him out to his usual bedtime you could be making him overtired which could be causing the additional wakings during the night.

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Sorry ds is 21 weeks, not 21 months, I typed it wrong! May try putting ds to bed slightly earlier and see if that makes any difference.

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dd was like this around that age. Sometimes she would be in bed for the night by 5.30pm! Never found it made a difference to what time she got up tbh. We have now slowly stretched it out so its bed at7 without a nap or between 7 and 8 with one.

ditto what bobblehead says

At this age ds also dropped his third nap (it was always a bit hit and miss) but he went to bed at about 5.30pm as he was so tired by then.

I never found it made any difference to his wake-up time. As he got older the bedtime went later, Now he goes to bed around 7/7.30pm.

However he is now in the process of dropping his morning nap so on the days he does this he goes to bed around 6pm - again his wake up time is not consistently different if he goes to bed at 6pm or 7.30pm - He does wake early though (often wakes up earlier if he goes to bed at 7.30pm than if he goes at 6pm - weird or what?).