What to do when they miss a nap and their nap schedule varies.

[Sodabread]

My 6mo dd is not a great sleeper, but appears recently to manage to take two decent naps. She tends to go down at 9 ish. Sometimes she ll only have 40 mins. Sometimes she will have 2 hours plus. Therefore her next nap time varies wildly. If she has only had 45 mins she ll go down at 12.30, if she has had 2 and a half hours she won't be tired by 12.30, so it ll be 2/2.30 before she goes down again. This means it is hard to establish sleepy times, and can be hard work to get her down.

Should I just go with this or try and be consistent about length of morning nap, and wake her if need be?

Also sometimes I cannot get her down for her morning nap. She is sleepy but does the classic waking up and missing sleep window. What do you do for the rest of that day, do you wait till next nap time, or persist with trying to get the first nap? Even if this means that their schedule is then out?

Help!!

My dd is 6mo too and seems to do exactly as you describe- I could have written your post!
I just tend to go with it (sometimes need to anyway as have older DD to ferry around).
It all seems to even out in the end and all I do is try to make sure she doesn't nap past 5.30pm so she goes down at night. It seems to work for us as she consistently sleeps through the night 7-7 and we don't have too stressful a time of it!

P.s. DD sometimes wakes up after 45 mins at morning nap but if I leave her a couple of minutes she does often go back off.

If you google Wake To Sleep method it.may help stretch out those naps from 45 mins to 1.5hrs. worked a treat for us!

Thanks. Reassuring to know I am not alone. Naps feel like a fine art. Sadly we are not having such a great time of it at night either...