3 to 2 nap transition help!

[Maisie2019]

DS is 7 months and I feel he is just about ready to drop to 2 naps. But I’m so confused how to do this!
Currently his schedule is roughly:
Wake 6.30am
Nap 1 9am-10am
Nap 2 12.30-1.30pm
Nap 3 4-4.30pm
Bed 7pm
However the 2.5 hour wake windows are getting too short now and he is really fighting his last nap. I’ve been doing some research and it says to slowly increase the wake windows but then how do we make it to bedtime if we do 2 naps?
Ive tried to work out a rough schedule in my head and he would need to be awake 3-3.5 hours and nap for 1.5 hours at each of his 2 naps to make it to bedtime.. but what do I do if he say wakes from his 2nd nap at 2pm?!
Does anyone have any sample schedules that worked for you changing to 2 naps? I also heard that increasing time awake too quickly can lead to false starts / lots of night wakings and the change is quite frankly freaking me out 😂

We’ve never had a nap schedule and I just let him nap when he’s tired, so the transition just happened organically when his first two naps started getting later and eventually there wasn’t time for a third nap anymore. It was really low drama.

same as @GinnyBee Our second is at this stage now and 7.5mo. Some days he has two naps, some days 3, depends what we're doing. With our first we did wake windows and naps were stressful. I havent had the brain space to do wake windows this time so he just sleeps when tired.

Today he woke 7 ish, slept 9.30-10 ish in the car on the way to swimming, then 11.30-12.15 ish in the car on the way home. Then about 2.30-5 in bed with me. If toddler is with DH or at childminder then I like to do a longer contact nap because I like it and he sleeps longer. Then he went to sleep for bed about 8.30.

However when it's just me with both of them, then he will have short naps either in the car seat or on my back in a carrier and sometimes that will be 4 short naps.

bedtime isn't set either, so if he's only had 2 naps and is very tired then we'll just do early night, 6.30 or 7. likewise if he's had 3 or 4 naps and the last one was a bit late then he'll be awake later, 9 or 10.

My DS dropped his 3rd nap quite early on - we shortened it down to 10/15 mins but he was taking longer and longer to settle and then eventually stopped dropping off all together.
When he did go down to 2 naps we did a morning nap of 30/45 mins and a long post lunch nap of 2 hours from 12:30 - 2:30. We went through a period of bringing his bed time forward to 6:30pm for a couple of months until he could stay awake until 7pm.
He's 10.5 months now and beginning to fight his morning nap.

Hi - I did the 2, 3, 4 schedule with both of mine, so from whenever they woke they'd have 2 hours before first nap. Then whenever they woke from nap 1 they have 3 hours of awake time before nap 2. Then 4 hours of awake time after waking from nap 2 until bed. I liked it as it gave a bit of flexibility instead of going off a rigid routine, and it worked well for both kids.

If you're aiming for a rigid bedtime then it's not as good, but you can always wake them from nap 2 to allow 4 hours before your planned bedtime.

Mine kind of naturally dropped the 3rd nap at this stage. She was fighting it, kept offering it into she spent more time fighting it than sleeping and just stopped.

Though I think you will need a longer lunch nap at lunch to get them through the afternoon. We capped our morning nap at 30 mins and then she started extending her lunch naps to 90mins/2hours.

Bring the each nap 30mins earlier