Moving from two naps to one.....

We thinkthat the twins might be ready to transition from two naps a day to one nap a day. They are finally sleeping through the night (minus a nightmare here or there....or a cold....or severe teething.... :FIFblush: ). Anyway, they are going down around 7:00 pm and getting up each morning at 6:00 am. When they do two naps a day they have their first one from 7:30-9:30 and the second one from about 11:30-1:30. I am wondering if anyone has any tips for moving the nap more towards a midday nap (*crossing fingers* for about 2-3 hours in length). Any help is appreciated! opcorn:

 

What signs are they showing of being ready to cut out the am nap? I usually wait for them to not go down for their pm nap anymore and then start cutting down their morning nap. So if they usually napped for 2hrs, I'd still put them down at the usual time but only for 1hr... then wake them up. You can start cutting that down as need be until they're completely out of the am nap altogether! Good luck, it's one of my least favourite processes as their afternoon nap then seems to be shortened until their bodies get used to the one nap thing... then they take off to the longer afternoon naps once they adjust!

 

I did not drop a nap until the kids were consistently boycotting it (in our case, their morning nap). I would suggest moving the morning nap up in 30 minute increments and see if that helps. Good luck!

 

Yep as pp said I would move the morning nap to 8am first of all, then 8:30, etc. and see what that does to the rest of the day. I thought mine were ready at that age and really they were just ready to be up longer in the morning 2.5-3 hrs. You just have to keep tweaking every couple of weeks unfortunately. I am still in the tweaking stage at 18 mos so I wish I could say it is a quick, easy, straightforward transition!! Maybe for some it is... Good luck!

 

Add me to the list that waited until they started boycotting, or cutting their naps really short. Mine were only napping about 45 mins for each nap, just long enough to mess the day up. So we cut out the morning nap, and moved their afternoon nap up by an hour or so, as well as bedtime. After a couple weeks they gradually transitioned to their afternoon nap back at the normal time, and bedtime at the normal time as well. They still only nap about 90 mins, 2 hrs if they are truly exhausted but that's very rare! :babyflips:

 

Thanks, everyone. I am not sure why my ticker is not updated with their correct age--we are really at about 16 months now. With regard to signs--when the babysitter puts them down (and when we put them down on the weekends) for that first nap at 7:30 they play in the cribs for at least an hour ....all we hear on the monitor is a constant, "Hi, Ava, wanna play?" from Violet. :headbang: Then, after a few minutes, we hear...."Ahhhhh, 5 minutes of bedtime music, snuggle up, Davis!" from Scout :headbang: Those crazy dogs! So, I really think that they are telling us that they don't need to start that first nap so early. I mean, it is nice that they are in their cribs and entertained for that hour--but, as far as scheduling goes, I think that we are ready to move forward. We are going to push the first nap by 30 minutes each day and see what happens. If it starts to backfire then we will back up and wait a while. Thanks for your help, ladies! :hug:

ETA: now the ticker seems right, strange.....

 

Wow, I'm really surprised that your twins go down for their first nap after only being awake 90 minutes at that age. Our 17 month old boys wake between 6:30am and 7:00am and go down for their morning nap between 10am and 10:30am and they have no problem making it that long. They've been on that schedule for at least a few months. And they also sleep really great for their AM nap, usually for 90+ minutes or so. But that means if they wake up around 12pm that they aren't tired for their afternoon nap until 4pm or later, and one LO _really_ fights his afternoon nap. Yesterday he didn't go to sleep until 4:30pm and we woke him up at 5:05pm, which is an awfully late nap. So we too are on the verge of moving to one nap. But for now I have asked the babysitter to start waking them from their morning nap after 60-75 minutes, so that hopefully they will be tired enough that they won't fight their afternoon nap as bad.

Naps and sleeping in general is probably the biggest thing we have wrestled with since the boys were born. I don't think I'll ever fully understand our boys sleeping patterns :-/ GL.

 

Mine transitioned very early. They have always been 7P-7A sleepers and used to be on a 10 and 2 nap schedule. About 12 months they started playing for a good 60-90 min prior to falling asleep and then sleeping till 1 or so. We realized that doing an afternoon nap at that point would just mess up bedtime, so we moved naptime to 11:30. It has since slowly been pushed back to somewhere between 12 and 1 and they usually sleep 2-3 hours.

Your AM nap is SO early that I would first start by gradually pushing back when you lay them down in the AM or wait till you see tired cues. Once you figure out when they actually need to go down you can figure out if it is enough in the middle of the day or if you still need to do an afternoon nap. I'm actually shocked yours make it from 1:30-7 right now! Mine get crankier as the day goes on, so its nice that they sleep until 2 or 3.