Are my expectations too high?

Okay...I am trying to get a new attitude regarding nap time and I am hoping you guys can help me adjust my expectations. My girls are 7 months old today and I am losing my mind with their naps. They are great night time sleepers. They go to bed around 6-6:30 pm and sleep until 7-7:30 am (sometimes later!). They do wake up between 5-6 am for a feeding, but always go back to sleep for another 1-2 hours. So, they are basically getting around 13+ hours of night time sleep. They are horrible nappers. I can't ever estimate how long they will be down. Some days it's 45 minutes...on the rare occasion it is 2 hours. Usually around an hour. I have all these friends who go on and on about what they are able to accomplish during the 2 hour morning nap and 2 hour afternoon nap. What?!!? I am lucky to get ONE nap last 1 1/2 hours...I would NEVER get 2 naps that long!

Are my expectations too high? I know that Weissbluth says you should expect around 15 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. So, since they get so much at night can I not expect long naps? I think I just need to accept the fact that they aren't going to be long nappers and release it. Right now, I fight every.single.day to get them to nap longer. My heart just sinks when I hear them cry out on the baby monitor! I think if I lower my expectations and just say...they'll sleep however long they sleep and move on, my life might be a lot easier! Or should I fight it and really try to get them to sleep longer? I would LOVE it if they could stay up a little longer in the evening. My husband and I have no life in the evening anymore! I think that I secretly keep hoping if they would nap longer, they could stay up a little later and we could actually go somewhere in the evenings. As it stands, they are usually falling apart by 6 pm.

So, tell me...accept the short naps as a consequence of a long night's sleep or keep working at extending those naps?

 

Mine only napped about 1 hr morning and afternoon, and that wasn't until they were 9 months old! At 7 months they were still doing 3 naps a day, all about 45 mins each.

Some kids will nap longer and some shorter. But I agree with you, they are getting a fantastic nights sleep which probably means they won't sleep as great for naps. All my kids have slept 12-13 hrs at night, my oldest two kids gave up naps completely by age 2-2.5 because they got all the sleep they needed overnight.

As for wanting to extend nighttime, do they have to get up at 7-7:30? Do you work and they have to get up to go to daycare of something? None of my kids ever went to bed that early, but I am a stay at home mom and was able to let my kids sleep in in the mornings. Right now the twins and my dd get up around 9-10am. They go to bed between 9-10pm as well.

If there's no reason they can't sleep later, what I would do is push their bedtime back by 15 mins for a few nights. Instead of going down at 6:30 make it 6:45. Keep in mind when you mess with sleep schedules you have to expect a few days of transitioning and crankiness! But make sure you push their nap times back by 15 mins as well, if you put them down for their naps at the same time or early because they are sleep, it'll wreck trying to change their bedtime.

Anyways, continue pushing that 15 mins or so every few days, you'll have to use your mommy judgement on how fast to move. Some kids will transition fast and you can do it all in a week. Some kids will take longer. Eventually you can get their bedtime at 7-8pm if you want

Good luck! I've learned that with kids, routine is great, but schedules suck! We have a "routine" of what happens, but no set times of when it happens! If they are tired at 1pm, they go down for a nap, if they aren't tired until 3pm they can stay up longer! But as I also said, I have been a stay at home mommy for 8 yrs so I have no real pressure to get them on a set schedule of times for anything, I have the luxury of being very flexible!

 

Danielle, thanks for your quick reply. Yes, I stay at home (which is part of the reason I would LOVE the nap time break...HA!). I have tried keeping them up a little later, but it seems they have some kind of internal clock that wakes them up between 7-7:30 every morning. At the same time, they seem to melt down every night around 6 pm. Maybe I should try the gradual pushing back of their bedtime. I usually move way too aggressively, probably. I push it all the way to 7 pm and they are deliriously tired! I should be more patient and see what 15 minute increments will do! Thanks for the advice! You and I are similar in desiring a "routine", not a schedule. I'm not really a clock watcher either and try to follow their cues.

 

Yeah jumping into it by pushing too far will hurt, them and you But by making it gradual you can get their bodies used to sleeping a little bit differently.

Also how dark is their bedroom? Mine were waking earlier and earlier and I realized it was getting lighter in their room much earlier than normal! I have tin foil and poster board covering their window now! Makes it dark as a cave. I also keep my house cooler overnight so the heat/warmth of morning doesn't wake them. Course we all sleep better when it's cool in my house!

One more thing, when mine go to bed 30-60 mins late they do get up earlier in the morning. It makes no sense whatsoever and drives me crazy because they are grouchy for the whole next day! But if it's only 15 mins later or so, they will sleep later. It's crazy!

 

Keep working at it. My first was the same - an awesome nighttime sleeper and horrible daytime napper. I used to dread naptime because it would take me forever to get him down and stress me out. We dropped to one nap a day around 14 months and that really really helped because I only had to stress out once a day, and then after a while it wasn't a stress anymore. The hardest part in the beginning of one nap a day was keeping him awake until naptime. He still naps 2-3 hours for me on weekends.

 

My boys were the dream nappers that your friends talk about. Baby girl...nope. She's been a one napper since she was 6 months old, and it averages 45 minutes (occasionally I get an hour or hour and a half). That's just her. I gave up trying to change it. But that was me.

 

My boys only take two naps, a short one 30-40 min in the morning - sometimes 1 hour or so - and a longer one in the afternoon which is about 2-2.5 hours. They sleep well at night usually. 12 hours or so. At least one of them...lol

Well, I don't get to enjoy any of these naps as I work and when I pick them up they are done with naps.

But as long as they are happy, don't seem tired and don't mind that the nap time not a "dream"-like one.

All babies are different. If they seem to be content for you throughout the day, then probably they sleep enough, even if it's seems too short.