When does your toddler nap?

[CarrotPuff]

If your toddler has one nap a day, when do they have it? And when are they up in the morning?

Just trying to work out the best rough routine, it works well if he naps 5-6 hours after waking up, but sometimes he falls asleep in the buggy much earlier than that or refuses to sleep and it takes forever to get him down...

He's 15mo.

The transition to establishing a single lunchtime nap does require some work - in the form of jiggling, singing and generally keeping awake.

You have to balance keeping toddler awake for long enough so that your afternoon isn't an over tired screaming nightmare.

My aim would be for a lunchtime nap of 12.30-2.30 (ish, give or take half an hour on the wake up time). But when you first move to one nap, he is not likely to be able to get through to 12.30 at first.

When we first drop the morning nap, lunchtime nap generally starts at about 11am at first (and might need a short 30 minute powernap in the afternoon). This is with a 8pm-7am night. So will require an early lunch.

Over time try to push the lunchtime nap later and later, but this is a gradual thing. I have the 12.30 nap time because I have the school run to do at 3.00pm with my older children, so wake up time is fixed with a no-later-than time. If I didn't have this constraint then lunchtime nap would be more like 1.00pm.

After lunch anytime from 1pm-3.30pm and lasts from 30mins to 2 hours. Sometimes she decides to skip her nap and then at 5pm tries to fall asleep in her dinner lol! Those are the difficult days! Bedtimes between 7-8pm as sometimes it takes her a while to settle then too. She dropped to 1 nap at 18 months x

Mine is 16 months, she is up at 7 and naps at 1. She only naps for just over an hour. She sometimes gets tired at around 11am (and very occasionally will fall asleep if we're in the car) but she can be distracted out of it. The transition from 2 naps to 1 takes a whiles found. DD was refusing her second nap but was exhausted as soon as a dropped one!

Thanks for your replies.

He's actually already firmly on one nap - started dropping from two at 12 months, and for the last month he's been refusing second nap unless something throws him off his usual routine.

Nap at 1ish has been working well lately, although he's got a tummy bug so had voluntarily had two naps today. I think he'll be back at one nap when he recovers.