How to get 11mo to sleep longer in afternoon

[weedie]

I'll be going back to work soon and my 11 month old dd will be going to a Childminder all day. I'm concerned about how her naps will work while she's there.

She currently wakes around 6.30am, naps from 10-11.30 and then again from about 2.30-3.30, in bed by 7.30. This has worked for us for a few months but the childminder has said she will only let the first nap be a snooze in the pram and will prioritise the second nap as the main, long nap of the day. From all the books I've read and from friends' experiences, it seems this is the norm and my dd's nap schedule is quite odd. With this in mind, I've been trying to adjust her napping schedule so that the first nap is a short one (45 mins), followed by a long one (2-3 hours) after lunch. This seems to be what is considered "normal". Unfortunately, it just isn't working for us!

I've tried moving her first nap forward to 9am but I always have to wake her after 45 minutes while she is still in a deep sleep. We then have 3 hours of awake time with lunch and milk and every day I put her down (exhausted) at 1 hoping for a long nap. She usually manages around 30 minutes and nothing in the world I try gets her to sleep longer than this. This means that in total she is sleeping for around 1hr15 per day, when she previously slept for around 2hr30. It's not enough sleep and by the end of the day she is a mess after being awake for 5.5 hours on the trot!

How do I get her to sleep for longer after lunch? She just will not do it. She's always been an easy baby to get to sleep to begin with, so that's not an issue - it's simply that she will not stay asleep for longer than 30 minutes for this nap. I'm worried that she won't be able to fit into the Childminder's schedule and will end up extremely sleep deprived. I've also got three weeks left of maternity leave and I don't know how pleasant it's going to be dealing with an incredibly overtired baby all the time. Is this something I just have to be quite persistent with and it will eventually click into place? It's been 4 days of trying now and I'm at my wit's end.

Thanks!

My feeling is that she will learn to fit into the childminders schedule pretty quickly.

I’m sorry I don’t have any advice for you, but I just wanted to say that my DD was on the exact same schedule at around 9m DD’s age (she then decided to drop to one nap while she was still 10m and she just has the long nap in the middle of the day now - but that’s not the point!). I thought it was really unusual but from speaking to others I don’t think it is. Just like your DD if I woke her from her first nap her second nap would go wrong. When she started to reduce her nap to move towards dropping to one nap it was the second nap, not the first, that got shorter. It’s just how she was and I was able to go with it as it worked. Is there no way the childminder can work with your daughter’s natural rhythm??

Also if it was me I’d enjoy my time with my DD until I went back to work, and then when she went to the childminder I’d let her deal with the tired child and see how long she wanted to do that for!! But that’s easy to say, and in reality I probably would be just as worried about it (and the impact on night sleep!) as you.