The Magical Mystical Nap: 12-18 months
Happy birthday! You’ve made it to one year of life with this bundle! They may be walking at this point, or getting ready to walk. They are learning all sorts of new things, stacking blocks, “reading” books, “coloring,” using utensils, and working on language a ton. This is a very fun phase of watching your baby turn into a toddler, and it comes with some potential for more freedom from nap prison. Your nugget is probably taking 2 naps per day, morning and afternoon, at the beginning of this window. At some point, you will transition to 1 nap, typically midday. It can be stressful thinking about transitioning. You may worry that your babe won’t be able to last all afternoon or that you will get less sleep at night because he may be overtired. Or, you may be ready to throw a party to have mornings open up wide. Whatever side you are on, there are some easy ways you can make this transition work for all parties involved. Getting rid of an unneeded nap can actually improve your kiddos overnight sleep. As with all nap transitions, you will need to move bedtime a bit earlier initially to help her move to just one nap per day. At this age, your expected wake window is 4-5 hours with two naps and 4.5-6 hours with one nap. You can use that as a guide to time your daily nap based on morning wake up, and to time bedtime as she adjusts to your new routine. We always made naptime right after lunch, so it wasn’t always based exactly on the clock. If we had a super early lunch, we would wait a bit. But basing it around this regularly scheduled activity may give you some more freedom if your kiddo is in any sort of half day school type program or daycare during the week and home on the weekends. The start of parents morning out for my kids was the impetus to move to one nap for both of my girls. When your kiddo is taking 2 naps per day, you would expect each nap to be about 2 hours. Once you move to one nap, you may get to embrace one glorious three hour nap. The heavens have opened wide people. (The total 24 hour sleep goal is 11-14 hours for both nap schedules) The signs to make the move to this new schedule are the same as other transitions: fighting nap time, steadily decreasing nap durations, trouble falling asleep at night, trouble falling asleep at nap time, and the worst one (in my opinion) early morning wakings. If you’re seeing any of these consistently, make a plan to make the move. Welcome to toddler-hood people!
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June 2020
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