Advice on dropping the afternoon sleep please

[MerlinsBeard]

DS1 is coming up 3 and will still have 2 - 2.5 hours sleep (if left undisturbed) every afternoon.

Recently he has been a horror to settle in the evenings and will often mess around until 9 or 10 o clock and its turned into us getting quite cross, naughty spacing him and even taking his blanket off him (his comfort type thing). Now if he was in his own room this would be much less of a problem but he shares with his younger brother (1) and it has a knock on effect for ds2s sleep during the day.

What i was wondering was, if i dropped the afternmoon sleep would it help with the evenings?

Yes I think it would my dd had an afternoon sleep til she was about 2.8 and since then only very rarely falls asleep in the day, She used to go to bed at 8.30-9 pm but now she doesn't sleep in the day she goes at 7.30 and is knackered by then. All I can think of to stop him sleeping in the day is to do something interesting with him or take him out for a walk. Also beware of the "Witching" hour usually 30 mins-1 hour before dinner is ready when they behave badly because they're starving and tired. It seems this is one of the sacrifices you have to make so they go to bed early!

He can last out of he has too but there is a definate witching hour(LOL how appropriate!), usually coincides with cooking tea. I'm gonna have to just stick it out aren't i?

A similar thing happened to me with my ds when he was about 20 months.

Stopping the afternoon sleep made his evenings better, he started going to sleep at 7pm.

We stopped the sleep by simply 'keeping him going' in the afternoon so he couldn't go to sleep (he could be a little horror for a while!), then getting him off nice and early in the evening.

It was worth it though, it transformed our evenings!

Yep i'm afraid so, my witching hour has got even worse because my 19 week old ds always decides he's hungry just when i'm in the middle of cooking.

YES! DD1, age 3 in June, was still having a 1.5-2 hour nap and was a monster in the evening to settle. 9.30-10PM.

We cut it out. She goes down at 8 no bother and sleeps peacefully till about 7.20 the next morning.

20 months Clayhead? Interesting, I think I'm at this stage with dd but she's 24 months and I thought she was too young to drop her nap, maybe not then.

Heavens! My ds is 8months and slept for half an hour today! What I could do with 2 hours in the day!!!
Was in bed by 7 and fast asleep by 5 past though, and probably will be till 8am tomorrow! Will he end up needing more naps as he gets mobile?

Yes, ProfYaffle, he was just ready then. dd was older, about 2.4.

ds just got to the point where, if he had had a daytime sleep, he would not sleep in the evening until 9 or 10 and it was sending us all mad. We decided to cut the afternoon sleep to see what happened and it worked so much better. Harder work for me at first to keep him awake but he soon adjusted and we've never looked back.

Yes, ds1 was like this at about the same age. I thought he still needed his nap because he still went off in the day very easily and was hard to wake from his nap. He'd often have 2 hours or more in the day, but was up till 9 or 10 at night and getting up very early in the mornings too.

So, we stopped his nap and he was fine! Some days he did get totally exhausted by late afternoon but after a few weeks he got used to it. I used to let him watch TV for a while when he would previously have been napping so he could veg out (and I had a bit of time to get things done) which worked quite well.

He still drops off in the car sometimes though (he's 4 now), and then won't settle at night.

Thanks Clayhead, maybe it's time to go for it then.