Down to 1 nap a day!

My girls are going to be 1 in about 2 weeks and on Christmas Eve we got rid of the morning nap so they are now down to 1 nap a day. I have been a schedule nazi up until this point...if one woke up I woke the other one up, when one ate, the other ate, etc. I was wondering if I could lighten up on this a bit now that they are down to one nap. For example, if one is 'sleeping in' in the morning leave her to sleep or if one wakes up early from a nap let the other one keep sleeping.

I have changed our daily routine around a bit to accommodate the new nap schedule and as a result have moved lunch and DS's nap earlier so that all 3 of them are still eating and napping at the same time so in a way they are still doing everything together.

For those of you who had/have your twins on the same schedule did you start to let them do their own thing at this point? If not at this point, when if ever did you do it? Thanks!

 

On a typical day, all three of mine eat lunch at the same time. For naps it does vary sometimes though. Natahaniel plays harder during the morning then William, so he is usually falling asleep in his lunch. I try to get him fed and into bed as fast as I can as opposed to the other 2. He is usually down by 11:45. William doesnt crawl around as much as Nathaniel, so I find he isnt as tired by lunch, and he is also a slower eater and doesnt need me to be constantly tapping his tray to keep him awake. I usually put him down around Noon. For Donevan, he generally goes down around 12:30. They are all staggered, but this way, they all pretty much sleep till 3, sometimes William does wake up around 2:30, and if he does I left the other ones sleep. Hope this aswers your question.

 

As we transitioned into a new nap schedule I often let the kids nap at different times. Mostly to avoid meltdowns! It was kind of nice spending one on one time with the second kid too.

Now that we're officially down to one nap a day, I put them in their cribs at 11:30 and will take them out at 1:30 if they're awake. If they're still sleeping they can sleep, but they are in there for 2 hrs no matter what.. many times they just play!

 

When my girls when down to once a day I was still very vigilent about their naps. They still both went down at the same time, but I was a little more relaxed about waking them up. I never let them sleep more than 3 hours for that nap (and in the beginning it was usually a good three hour nap), and I never let them go down later than 1 or so because it would mess up their night time routine. For us, the one nap was so long that it was still really important that they got it, and that they didn't start it too late or too early. Too early and they were wiped by dinner, too late and they were too wired for bedtime.

 

Thanks! I think I'm going to try to keep nap time and bedtime the exact same for both of them but if one is still sleeping either in the morning or at nap I'll start letting them sleep (within reason). I know from my older one that his sleep needs vary from day to day depending on what we've done, how his sleep was the night before, what his nap was like, etc. so I'm sure the girls will have different needs on different day too...it just feel weird to let them do their own thing when I've been treating them almost as a single entity for almost a year now, lol!!! I just keep thinking that if I had 3 singletons all on the same schedule I would most likely try as hard as I could to keep them all on the same schedule but allow for fluctuations.