I am fairly certain my son is ready to drop from 2 naps to 1 nap, he's showing signs; split nights (up for hours at time, and on my first full week back at work too, yay!), resisting naps, early waking, night wakings etc.
He's very almost 14 months old.
From looking at the various ways to handle this transition, I feel the gradual approach will be the one that suits him best (we've tried him a few times on one nap and he can only ever cope with it for a day or two at a time before it badly affects night sleep due to overtiredness). Huckleberry suggest moving the first nap later by 15 minutes every few days and offering a cat nap in the afternoon to get them to bedtime, or an early bedtime if that's refused. Their example schedule looks like this:
Wake at 630
Nap 1 at 1030-1130
Nap 2 at 330-4
Bedtime at 715, asleep by 8pm
My question is, when moving the nap later 15 mins each time, do you still wake them at 1130, or do you let them keep sleeping hoping they won't need the afternoon cat nap? And if you do still wake them, do you wake them at 1130 still, or 15 mins later at 1145?
This will then have a knock on effect with the cat nap - so what happens there?!
It's all so bloody complicated, a horrid mix of my favourites, maths and science... NOT how my brain operates! And certainly not on no sleep and when my brain is full of all the fun that comes with just having returned to work after over a year off!
Does anyone have any thoughts on the above, or failing that, some simple advice on how to handle this transition? I don't think I can cope with any more split nights!
-We can't do cold turkey and just press on with one nap only, he's not ready.
-Taking him for a drive used to work for the more difficult second nap, but that's now not an option for 3 days out of 5 due to our childcare arrangements and also doesn't work as well as it once did anyway.
-There isn't enough time in the day for me to stretch his wake windows any further without getting into obscenely late bedtime territory.
I'm thinking we keep pushing the first nap later, every few days, and offer the cat nap where possible but just do an early bedtime on the days where it isn't, which I suspect will be most of the time.
And don't wake him, just let him sleep as long as poss?
Does this sound like a good plan?! Or will earlier bedtimes mean horrible early starts?! He wakes at about 7am most mornings now which I appreciate a lot!