extending naps?

[colleenfs]

Any ideas on how to get the little ones to nap a little longer? Julia has recently moved to one midday nap, and some days, she is just not getting enough sleep! She goes down after lunch @ 12:30, and ideally she sleeps til 3:00. But some days she is awake and screaming by 1:45, 2:15, 2:30, etc. If she is awake and happy, I leave her in the crib til 3:00, but if she is screaming (more likely scenario) I will get her out.

I've tried to go back to 2 naps, but if she takes a morning nap, she WILL NOT take an afternoon nap, and then she is a bear by bedtime.

Any ideas?

Colleen
Mama to Julia 1-10-02

[August Mom]

Wow. No advice here. I'm just marveling at Julia sometimes taking a 2.5 hour nap. I'm lucky if Justin naps for an hour.

[sweetbasil]

We went through this when DS transitioned to one nap, too. Have you tried moving the nap's start time around and seeing if that helps? For DS, it needed to be a tiny bit later- say, 1:00, and I kept moving it later until he reached 2:00pm for start time. Now, he goes a good 3 hours (sometimes 3 1/2) and is awake just in time for his daddy to come home.

Some of his friends went down for naps around 11:30, though, and that worked great for them.

Good luck!

[egoldber]

You may want to try and see if you can push her naptime back a little bit. I find that if I put Sarah down too early, she doesn't sleep as long. But even so, her nap length varies. It could be 1 hour one day to 3 1/2 hours. But she averages 2 to 2.5 hours.

As they get older, they just need less sleep some days. I actually haven't found her to be any more cranky on days she only gets a one hour nap vs when she gets a 3 hour nap (althugh the same cannot be said for mommy :) ).

HTH,

[Tracey1]

It's the same as some of the other replies for us - if I put her down too early, she only naps 1-1 1/2 hrs - but if I can stall her until 2:30-3 she will almost always nap 3hrs.

Sometimes on the days that she gets up extra early in the morning (5am-yikes!), she can't make it to 2pm for a nap. Like you, if I let her nap in the morning, she won't nap in the afternoon - so I often time my errands so that she's in the car around 10:30-11 and she'll take a short, light snooze, maybe 20-30 minutes and that keeps her happy but doesn't interfere with her afternoon nap.