TOTD! Nap Transitions! Your experience please!

Topic Of The Day! (Forget that stuff I wrote last night! This is more important!) HOW DID YOUR SWEET ANGELIC BABY TRANSITION TO ONE NAP?

Around nine and a half or ten months, MY sweet angelic baby's clockwork nap schedule went poof. Cue many angsty blog posts. Around eleven months his nighttime sleep went down the toilet too. Cue MORE angsty blog posts. Around twelve months I decided to give up. Schedules, cry it out, waking him up, leaving him in his crib for an hour even if he wasn't sleeping- none of it was working. Some days he took two naps, some days he took one nap, some nights he slept through, some nights he was wide awake between midnight and two, some nights he woke us up whimpering every other hour. And did I mention that nothing we tried seemed to matter? NOTHING HELPED.

Hence the giving up. I am still frustrated, because I never know when to plan anything and even if he has a string of two nap days, one rotten night will have him waking up late and not napping the next day at ALL, so WHO KNOWS. Like this week he seemed to "regress" into two regular naps. Until last night, when he had a hard time going down and probably didn't really fall asleep until 8:30 or 9 and woke up at 7:45. Which is pretty late for him. Which means it is 10:15 right now and he is in his crib just in case he is interested in a nap. Although as soon as the moms group babies arrive (he has a sixth sense about other! babies!) he will be up and demanding to play.

Anyway. The giving up means giving up on a routine, which I'd always thought was absolutely necessary for baby-rearing, but I suppose it is only absolutely necessary if the baby WANTS a routine. Which mine clearly does not. At least right now. But! Giving up means I am not wailing about it on the phone to my mother and my friends and hopefully you've noticed a sharp decrease in blog angst. (Don't respond to that.)
But! There's still the matter of what to do in any given morning or afternoon and because I have no plan of attack, no strategy, no routine, I am perplexed by what to do every single day.

It appears that my kid is pushing back his morning nap. He is no longer tired exactly 2 hours after he wakes up. More like two and a half, three, three and a half. So I've been waiting longer to try putting him down. Which is fine. But then sometimes that is his ONLY NAP. There are days when I put him down at ten, he'll sleep for an hour and a half, and that's it. Or he'll get tired around 4 or 5, but I don't put him down then because he'll never go to bed on time. Those days he'll go to bed earlier which usually means he wakes up earlier which means an entirely different kind of day.

It really helped a lot to hear my pediatrician say that when her son was transitioning to one nap, he seemed to drop the afternoon nap. I kind of think that's what Jack is doing. If he gets a morning nap early enough, the afternoon nap is a given, even if it's hard to come by or doesn't last very long. But if the morning nap is more like a late morning nap, there goes my afternoon coffee break.

Since I'd much rather he take his nap after lunch like a GOOD BABY, I've been wondering how to encourage that. Like this morning he woke up late and I thought about just keeping him up until after lunch. I didn't, mostly because I had to clean up the living room and does anyone else's baby like to walk directly into the pile of dust and crumbs you've just swept into a nice pile? Just mine? So I stashed him in the crib thinking that if he was still awake when the moms group comes over I'd just get him up. But now I think he's right about to fall asleep and everyone's coming in 5 minutes.

Why am I writing a post if everyone's coming in 5 minutes???

Oh! AND all of this seems to be influenced by how much his teeth are hurting that day because THE MOLARS ARE COMING THE MOLARS ARE COMING.

Anyway. Just wondering what it was like for you!

Comments

[Jen]

Our neighbor's dog used to run frantically into our house and eat the pile of dust and crumbs that had just been swept into a neat pile.

[JMC]

It is kind of a nightmare going from two naps to one, but once you're there it's nice. I always had to plan my day THAT morning depending on what time the baby woke up. There was no planning ahead; it was all flying by the seats of our pants. At least with this one you don't have other children's schedules to worry about, like getting them to preschool on time and whatnot. Waking baby FROM a nap SUCKS!

[Tara]

This inquiring mind wants to know, too. Of course she napped like a sleepy little angel all weekend (when her dad was home) and now that it's just us, we're back to crap napping. One nap? Two naps? Who knows. Certainly not me.

[kris]

I have an 8 month old girl. She used to nap well, and sleep through the night. Now...well, what you just described sounds pretty familiar. I have been reading your blog for awhile but never commented, sometimes it's nice to hear that someone else is going through the same 'phase'.

[Arwen]

Well, I wanted to kill myself at ten and a half months with the sleep regression (waking up every forty-five minutes all night long. I am so not kidding), so you're not alone in feeling the just-before-one age is hard. As for the transition to one nap, I hated that too because it was impossible to plan anything. Some days Milla needed two naps, sometimes only one, and I couldn't predict which it would be with any sort of accuracy. I just had to go with the flow and it did suck, but it was over in (if I remember right) three-ish months. So it will end eventually.

[Maureen]

I'll let you know when it's complete, a Jack is taking his second nap right now even though he "transitioned" about five months ago.

I am less of a planner than you, so it has not bothered me, but Jack has actually never had a rock solid nap routine. Even when the morning nap was reliably 2 hours after he woke up, his afternoon nap could fall pretty much anywhere and last for any length of time. So I'm sort of used to crap-shooting my way through the day. I make plans as best I can and wake him if I can't miss the appointment, and skip things I can skip if he's sleeping.

But! I have found that if we go out in the morning and come home for lunch at 11:30 or 12:00, there is a high likelihood that he'll take a long after-lunch nap like he's "supposed" to. But if we have no plans in the morning, I find myself suggesting a nap around 9:00 because I get sick of entertaining him. Until yesterday, that usually meant he didn't take an afternoon nap, but yesterday and today he did/is, so who knows.

So if you really want to get him into an afternoon napping routine, try having plans outside every morning for a week, and be home by lunch. Maybe that will get him used to the schedule?

I can relate to the scheduling nightmare; but just make plans with people who understand that you may have to cancel because of naps, and you'll be fine.

And Jack always, ALWAYS walks through my dust pile.

[Maureen]

Oh, and it all depends, of course, on what time he wakes up for the day. He seems to go through cycles of 7-8am wakings followed by 6-6:30am, and we're currently on a 6-6:30am cycle, so the morning nap is more necessary on those days.

[Heather]

Hello... I am a long time lurker. When my son's (5 & 3) were getting teeth our routine went out the window, but after that was done then they went back to normal. I would try waking him up each day at the same time seeing if that makes any difference. If not then give an early lunch 11ish then try putting him down for a nap around noon if that works you can slowly transition so he goes down when you want him to. A book to try is Solve your childs sleep problems by Richard Ferber has worked with all my boys including the 3 month old. Good Luck!

[Emily]

I'm emailing you, because I was completely neurotic about the nap thing, too. It drove me BONKERS.