Whats happened to DD's naps??

[TettyLouBar]

Hi all,
DD is 21 wks old, and until now has had 3 naps a day, each between 45-90 mins long. She would sleep 7-7 at night with 2 wakes for BFeeds. We used the 2 hour rule for nap timings and it was working like a dream.
As soon as we took her into a dark room, she would yawn, put her head on my chest, thumb in and doze off.

But in the last week she seems to be wide awake and refusing to nap, its taken me all morning to get her to nap. she finally went to sleep at 1245 so she was awake for 4 and 3/4 hours! is this a phase? normal? to do with the cold she's just had? her age?

Do I have to keep trying to get her to nap every 2-3 hours or should I re arrange her nap routine now that she's older??
She wasn't even bothered that she hadn't slept and I really think had I let her stay awake, she may have been happy to play for a few more hours!
Has anyone else experienced this?

At this age, DS was having 2 naps on nursery days, 3 naps on home days - in fact, he was on 3 naps right up to about 11 months, then 2 naps up to 18 months. What's important is not so much the number of naps, but the total amount of sleep in 24 hours. If she's still doing well in her 24-hr sleep budget, then being awake for nearly 5 hours is not a problem at all (unless she's showing signs of over-tiredness).

You are on the cusp of some very, very exciting gross motor development. Oral fixation stage, sitting up, command crawling, actual crawling, then pulling up and eventually walking are not very far around the corner. Her world is growing bigger and more interesting and some babies are all "ho hum big wide world, I like my kip" and others are all "WOOOOOO BIG WILD WORLD! WEEEEEEEEE I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD!" It's quite normal for babies who have previously slept through/napped well to have a huge sleep regression around this time, partly because of the growth spurts (around 4 and 6 months, which can last several weeks each) and partly because of the burgeoning desire to explore everything.

Hi. Not much to add here but just wanted to say that the same thing happened to my DS around the same time. We had a nightmare getting him to nap - rocking/crying for ages and I nearly went mad....then it got better all of a sudden. Now DS is 26 weeks old and it's started again but according to my Wonder Weeks book, 26 weeks is another massive development stage and it's normal for sleep to go out of the window. DS has started waking up at 5am and screaming until I pick him up. Need to inject caffeine in to my veins.....!

Oh yes, been there done that! I remember at about this age my DS was virtually hyper- one day I phoned my mum to say 'oh my God! He won't rest!' That was the same day he learnt to pull himself up and tried to throw himself out of his pram! Like Ches says, it's all about developmental stages etc. When we get to one of these phases I try to just go with the flow for a bit til he settles back into a routine. He always does, it just makes it tough to plan anything for a while.

Oh, the other thing I do is wear him out- we spend whole days outside at times like this. That usually works!

Thanks, that all reassures me that its perfectly normal as I thought. I too have to Wonderweeks Book, and I thought that week 19 growth spurt was over as we had sleepless nights a few weeks ago and all the other things mentioned in the book. But it never really affected her day time napping so when this started to be effected at 21 weeks I thought it was strange.
(think she might have a touch of teething too) chewing on all things in reach and dribbling like a goodun!!