One of the downfalls of having a consistently amazing night sleeper is that H has always been a reluctant daytime napper. Not terrible, as she usually always goes to sleep and sleeps well, but it can often be a fight, and she always dropped naps too early (the third nap at four months and the second nap at eleven months) which means we've had our fair share of difficult dinner and bath times.
Recently, H has started refusing to go down for her daytime nap, but only on certain days - namely, the days she is home with me! Luckily she does get around 12 hours of sleep at night so she isn't too difficult on these days, but there are a number of reasons I feel she still really needs her nap:
- She is clearly tired, rubbing her eyes and yawning some days as early as 11am.
- She will fall asleep if we get in the car after 3pm and she hasn't napped.
- On the occasions she does sleep, she can sleep for up to three hours if unwoken, and;
- She is not yet (quite) 2.5, which according to all research I've done is still much too young to give up a nap completely.
I've been going out of my mind a little trying to get her to nap. On Friday I was certain she would drift off in the car after a big morning at the zoo, but no, she was wide awake and asking for a movie the second we got home!
Today, I decided vigilance was the only answer. H woke up today with a runny nose and has been yawning all morning so I was confident tiredness wasn't an issue. She dirtied her nappy right before bed and had eaten a big lunch so everything was as it should be. We read stories and I used a trick they taught me at daycare - telling her if she wasn't asleep when I came back I would take her bunny away! Mean I know!
Anyway, twenty minutes later she was still calling out to me and I decided I'd had enough. I went into her room and took bunny, but then when she lay down I stroked her forehead and "shushed" for a minute just as I used to do when she was a baby. Immediately her eyelids started drooping. Aha! She was tired! So I went with it and within five minutes she was sound asleep.
So, clearly, I have forgotten in the space of a couple of years that sometimes all it takes is a little bit of comforting for a child to fall asleep. Maybe, just maybe, that is all she needed to get back in the rhythm of napping at home. More likely she will expect me to stroke and shush her every DAY but hey, I would rather that than no napping - at least until baby arrives in four weeks. Then we could have problems...
Interestingly, when I was madly researching toddler napping most sources maintained children need to nap until they are at least FOUR, at which point they can transition to quiet time in their rooms. Both J and I can remember having quiet time until into our tweens, which I think is a great idea for children and parents!
I also stumbled upon a good sleep site, The Sleep Lady - she essentially tries to sign you up to her website to access her "sleep solutions" which I guess isn't much different to purchasing a book (as I've mentioned before, I followed Tizzie Hall's routines and intend on doing so again) but her blog has some really useful tips! For example I read that for newborns the morning nap doesn't properly establish until 12 weeks and the afternoon nap and early waking are the last things to fall into place, which is information that could have saved me tens of hours unsuccessfully resettling an 8-week-old H.
Now, I'm off to do absolutely nothing while my child SLEEPS!
Z x
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