2yo sleep latency at night vs nap

[Doughnut100]

My 26 month old daughter falls asleep on the boob at her lunch time nap in 15 mins like clockwork. But at night it takes 30 mins and she is jumping around like a nutcase. We have a good routine with bath and books, and she gets plenty of exercise in the day.

Anyone have any ideas for helping with this? Is the gap between lunch nap and bedtime usually shorter or longer than the gap between morning wake and lunch nap?

I really don’t want to reduce the lunch nap as I’ll lose my mind, it’s my only time to decompress and I have a 4 month old baby too. Also I already tried capping it at 45 mins or an hour and it didn’t help anyway.

wake up 6am
lunch nap midday-1:30
bedtime 730

We have not done any sleep training and use gentle methods etc. So I’m not up for changing that seeing as we’ve got this far. She sleeps on a floor bed and needs one of us to lie with her to go to sleep, although I wish I could wave a wand and have her go to sleep on her own!

Mine is a year younger than yours so feel free to ignore everything I say if you want! Mine has always in his 14 months of life had a shorter time awake in the morning than the afternoon. Currently he'll be awake 4-5 hours before nap and then 7-8 hours before bedtime. So for example yesterday he woke at 6am, nap 10.45-12.15 and then bedtime at 7.

You could try a later bedtime if capping the nap didn't work. But I've also heard that schedule changes can take around a week or so to adjust fully, so if you only tried it once and it didn't work then don't give up just yet, give it a few days.

Thanks that’s really useful. Very annoying as our playgroups work with a midday nap but I think you might be onto something and that the nap should be at 11. Unfortunately our wake up at 6am is non negotiable as that’s when dp has to get up and when he gets up it wakes her. Hmm.