how long are your babies up between naps? i'm having a hard time incorporating that 3rd nap in the day. they are up usually 2 hours at the most before i put them down again. after an hour and a half of playing i feed them, and that last half hour they are rubbing their eyes. here's our "schedule" 8am - wake, play together in crib for half hour to an hour 9am - dressed, hugs and cuddles 9:30/10am- bottle 10:30 - nap (now this nap could be 30 minutes or it could be 2 hours. let's say hypothetically it's 1 1/2 hours... ) 12pm - play 1:30/1:45 bottle 2/2:30 nap (again let's say hypothetically it's 1 1/2 hours... ) 4pm - play 5:30 - bottle 6:30 - solids 7:00/7:30 - bath and jammy time (night routine) 7:30/8pm- bottle and bed what do i do after their 5:30 bottle, put them back in the cribs till 6:30 and jsut wake them after the hour (in case they sleep that long) ? they REALLY need some quiet time at that point otherwise they are just crazy crabby by 7pm. thanks in advance!
Can you forego the last nap and move bedtime up? That's what we did when we dropped the third nap. My girls were 6:30-6:30 sleepers and for a couple of weeks we moved bedtime up to 5:30 and then gradually moved it back to 6:30 to get them used to being up longer. It does make for a crazy afternoon, but it looks like yours are headed that way.
I was having a really tough time with my girls taking naps, they strted doing 30min naps again too so I dropped the 3rd nap and moved bedtime to 530-6 (we are closer to 6 again). They are going about 2.5hrs awake time now and they're happy! They take a 1.5-2hr nap in the morning and an 1-1.5hr nap in the afternoon! We can actually do things now, its great! If they take a crappy nap then I will still put them down for a 3rd but its usually only a 30min catnap. BTW, they were beastly for a couple days but they worked it out rather quickly. Good luck!!
We do 2-2.5 hours of awake time, DS always takes the 3rd nap, DD is variable, she fights it alot, we often go out for a walk or to run errands b/c she will catnap in the carseat. Our schedule looks like this now on a good day: 7:30 wakeup 8:00 solids/bottles 9:30-10:30/45: nap 11:00 solids 12:00 bottles 1:00-2:15/30 nap 3:00 bottles 4:30-5:00/15 nap 5:30 solids 6:30 bottles 7:00 bed
