6 month old afternoon nap help

[thingybobwotsit]

Wondering if anyone has any advice on naps for my 6 month old - for the last week he's been consistently refusing his afternoon nap and is therefore awake too long before bed.

He wakes up about 5.30 (not ideal but manageable), has a morning nap 2.5/3 hours later for up to 2 hours, then another nap a few hours after that for an hour-ish, which takes us through to somewhere between 1pm and 2pm usually.

But he's now refusing his afternoon catnap so he's awake for hours before bedtime at 7. I've tried pram and cot naps but he just will not sleep in the afternoon at the moment. I'm worried about moving bedtime too much earlier in case it pushes the early starts even earlier, and also my husband would never get to see him as he doesn't get in from work til around 6.30. He does bedtime routine before handing him over to be fed to sleep (but that problem is a whole other thread).

Any tips on how to get him to nap in the afternoon - or extend the morning naps I guess?

Thank you!

I'd drop the second morning nap and see if he will go for his afternoon nap then.

When do you feed him? Mine are 6 months and I do food at lunchtime which seems to make them sleep afterwards, so from 1-3ish. They’ll get up for a bottle then stay awake till around 7-8 and go to bed for the night, but I wake them around 10-11 for a bottle.

Thank you both!

I don't think I'd get away with dropping the lunchtime nap - he's normally desperate for it. I've been trying to stretch it as much as I can but ending up with a very unhappy little boy.

He has breakfast around 6.45 / 7 and we also do lunch... I've been trying to do it before the second nap as that seems to make sense timewise with when we would eventually add dinner in - but he just won't eat anything if he's tired so he often ends up having it when he's woken around 2. It doesn't seem to make much difference to the nap situation for us unfortunately

Can you stretch out the gap between naps. At that age my DD woke about 6.30-7, had a nap at 9.30 then again at 1.30.
Was tired by bath at 6.15, but always went out brilliantly!