What do you do when naps are out of whack?

[Etherealhedgehog]

6 month old DD has only just started sometimes taking longer naps (previously all were 35 mins exactly) but it's still very unpredictable - most days she'll do at least one longer nap, but sometimes two. Also, the morning starts at a different (godawful early) time each day due to terrible sleep in the wee hours, all of which is to say that we have no kind of predictable schedule.

So what I'm wondering is, on days when the first two naps are long, leaving insufficient time for a third nap but too long a wake window to bedtime - what do you do? (I guess she will transition to two naps soonish but it feels like we're not reliably there yet).

Eg. Yesterday she napped 7.30 - 10 (unusually long, catching up on lack of sleep in the wee hours), then again 12.40 - 2.10. We normally start bedtime at 5.30 in the hope that she goes to sleep at 6.30, though 7 is more likely.

So in this scenario do you suck up the long wake window and hold out til normal bedtime, move bedtime (very!) early, try and take her for an early nap which might fail (and still mess up bedtime), or take her for a nap after an appropriate window and then delay bedtime accordingly (by about 1-1.5 hrs, so not a small amount)??

Yesterday we tried just keeping her awake til bedtime and sleep was a shitshow, but that might have happened anyway. There have been other days where she's had a similar pre-bed wake window and did relatively ok.

Would love to know what the standard thing to do is in this nap transition type situation / what worked for you.

In answer to your main question, I would offer a catnap during a nap transition. So say baby wakes at 2pm and you want to put them to bed at 7pm and your wake windows are usually 3 hours or whatever. I would offer a 15 - 20 min catnap at 4.30ish. You'll likely get a lot of responses here about the rest of it - for example not letting baby make up for shit early hours sleep by taking a long nap in the morning etc! Mine started to drop the third nap at 6 months and at nearly 10 months still needs a catnap some days to be able to make it until bedtime.

@linerforlife thanks, that makes sense - so to clarify, would you get them to sleep and then just wake them up after 20 mins? (Because left to it she would probably sleep her standard 35 and that would be enough to make bedtime a slog, probably)

Re. the long early nap - that's interesting to know. I posted a while back about our terrible mornings and mostly just got 'that's normal' so we've just been winging it and focusing on maximising daytime sleep, but any tips on how to improve that will be gratefully received!

When my DD was around 7 months (6 months adjusted) she started taking longer naps which then left me in a similar predicament as you. What I ended up doing was dropping to 2 naps and sticking with it. It was a slog and she was a bit grumpy during the transition but she got used to it after a few days.

I started pushing the 2 naps back so she usually wakes around 6 (sometimes earlier, sometimes 6:30) and her first nap is at 9:30 so I try to get as close as I can to it - she then sleeps until 11, then her second nap is between 2/2:30 until 4 and bedtime is at 7. It took a while to get her into this new routine but it worked out much better in the long run. The late catnap would always ruin bedtime so I knew it was time to drop it.

Second the catnap idea, we used the pram or the car rather than do the faff of putting down in the cot etc

Hi OP,

We found the 3 to 2 nap transition at around 7 months particularly hard! Sleep was an absolute disaster no matter what we did tbh. Two naps, back to three naps, sometimes two, sometimes three...all terrible. So we decided to just persevere with 2 naps and hope he would get used to it and settle down...he did.

It took about a month to really click. But he’s still not on a clock-based schedule. Sometimes he wakes up at 6am and sometimes at 8am! So sometimes he’s going to bed really early and sometimes much later.

When we were struggling like you were with the above, I found just bringing bed time forward worked best. But that’s mainly cause my LO fought the third nap hard, and I did not want to fight him every afternoon for the foreseeable future.

Thanks all, glad to hear it's not just us who's struggled with this! We tried stretching the wake window til bedtime s couple of days ago and night sleep was even way worse than usual so I think she's not quite ready for that yet. Tried a catnap yesterday and that seemed to do the trick - bedtime not affected despite shorter than usual wake window. So we'll stick with that for now and then probably start trying to drop the third nap when it gets harder to make happen (she currently only naps on me or in the pram so at least I don't have to worry about whether she gets herself to sleep or not, or at least it's easier than it would be!)