My son has started to only go to sleep for his afternoon nap in the car. If I try and get him to sleep doing our normal routine in his cot it takes an hour and a half at least. This means his nap is too late in the day and we then have a bedtime battle too. It has been suggested he might not need an afternoon nap anymore but I disagree, as he will fall asleep in 10 minutes in the car and stay asleep for two hours or more (I normally wake him after 1.5-2hrs). I don't really mind driving him as I just have to get to the motorway 5 minutes away and then he goes off to sleep but I'm worried it's creating a bad habit and also I need to have a back up for the times I can't take him out in the car. I am also expecting my second in October and don't want to have to rely on driving to get him to sleep.
Bedtime is also a bit of a battle and he will spend up to an hour sometimes doing cot acrobatics while I sit next to him in the dark. I've never been able to put him down and leave the room and started by feeding him to sleep, then rocking him to sleep and then lying him down and patting his back in the cot. He seems to want to be left alone in the cot now and doesn't want any songs or to be touched, he just needs me to sit in the nursery with him. But I can't go on sitting there for ages and ages every day, especially not when the second arrives.
Our normal bedtime routine up until a couple of months ago was changing his nappy, reading stories (with a drink of milk at bedtime) then a cuddle and songs and he would drift off in my arms. It would take about 45 minutes altogether. Naps were usually 1-1.30 until 3.30-4 and bedtime about 7.30-8pm. He's never reliably slept through the night for long periods and often needs me to come back in and resettle him but naps have been pretty good until recently.
It started to change after we went on holiday in May and abandoned normal routines and just let him nap in the car when he wanted to (generally this was a couple of hours from late morning). I've tried putting him down for a nap earlier than after lunch to see if he had just gone past the point of initial tiredness but it was a disaster and he didn't go to sleep for hours. He started going to creche two mornings a week in May too so I wondered if that might be a factor? Sometimes if he's had a bad night they are able to get him to sleep by putting him in a buggy, but I've tried this at home and it doesn't seem to work anymore (he used to nap in the buggy when he was little).
I'm so perplexed - is this just another phase I have to ride out or do I need to do something about it before my second arrives? Or does it really seem like he is giving up his nap? He slept for 20 minutes at creche the other morning and then not for the rest of the day but he was feral by 4pm and I could tell he wanted to sleep but I just couldn't let him as he wouldn't have gone to bed before 9pm then.
Sorry this is very long but I want to provide as much information as possible.