Dropping last nap - is it normal to have two completely different schedules?!

[crazychemist]

DD is 2.4. She needs between 10 & 12 hours of sleep overnight. Her typical awake time is about 8 hours.

At the moment, we seem to have fallen into a weird pattern. On Monday she wakes at about 7.30. She has an afternoon nap at about 1.30. Then she isn’t ready for bed till nearly midnight! On Tuesday I can wake her at 7.30 and we have the same day (which is hell for me!) OR I can let her sleep until 10.30. If I leave her to sleep, she can then miss her nap and goes to bed at 7.30. Wednesday is then like Monday. We effectively have a two day routine!

Is this normal/ok? If she naps every day it’s an absolute killer for me as I have to be up early 3 days a week so I want to be asleep before midnight. But she really can’t stay up for a full 12 hours yet, she’ll nod off sitting upright in her high chair or in the bath!

If we go on like this, will the non-nap date eventually be more than half the time? Is this how the last nap goes? We didn’t have anything like as much difficulty with other nap transitions

hopeful nudge

Maybe it’s just me! I thought this must have happened to other people

Try and make her nap no more than 30 mins and to start absolutely no later than 1:30. Would that be viable.
She's probably not ready to fully drop the nap but it may be too long and she needs more awake time as she's getting older.
We're just coming out of the other side of this and I found initially reducing the nap length helped and there are days my toddler doesn't sleep at all which is fine for her but still does need to sleep here and there.

Reducing nap was pretty disasterous for us. A short nap meant she was grumpy and tired all afternoon but still wouldn’t go to sleep any earlier! So we ended up with the worst of both worlds.

So when your toddler does sleep, does she still have roughly the same bedtime? I guess I’m just amazed at how incredibly different it is when she has a nap vs when she doesn’t

If toddler falls asleep unexpectedly (day if we're driving somewhere) she needs at least 7hrs awake time, so if she sleeps at 2:30 for as long as the car journey it can mean a 10:30pm/11pm bed time.
How many days/weeks did you give the shorter nap for, I'd suggest that as things are so all over the place at the mo it might be worth sticking it out for a couple of weeks? Maybe try 1hr/45 mins and very gradually reduce it. A 7am wake up regardless of bedtime and see how that goes maybe? Behaviour will be rotten in the afternoon for a little bit but I found that we stuck with it and it improved. There is a huge sleep regression at this point though which could be the reason you're experiencing this - it may just pass on its own?

Ah, I didn’t know there was a sleep regression at this age. Could that be the case even though she’s sleeping just fine over night when she does finally go down? On nap less days she’s been waking early (which I assume is over Tiredness?), but then I can get her back down and otherwise she’s not waking at the moment. On days when she’s napped she doesn’t wake.

I tried nap shortening for 1 week, and it was such a horrrific week I thought it couldn’t possibly be working. She wasn’t sleeping until 1am each night (which is a killer as I’m up at5 on three mornings) and was up every hour or so. I thought I might try shortening again in a couple of months, but couldn’t face sticking with it longer at the time.

Oh dear, perhaps I am just mad for trying this? It does seem to be working for her, even though she has hugely different bedtimes on alternate days!

Oh, we did try 7am wake up for a while, but there were two reasons it didn’t work:

1. once a week she is at home with either my DH or DM. Both are very late risers so never wake up in time to wake her up and generally they sleep until she wakes them. This is not an argument I’m ever going to win!

2. for a while her routine was to be woken at 7am (she’d scream and scream, and then fall asleep sitting upright as soon as I put her down for a second to do anything), by about 8am she’d finally perk up. She’d have her nap at about midday. Regardless of length of nap, she’d never be asleep before 10pm! Sometimes much later, and her mood would be horrific all day long because she was tired