Chronicling the Two to One Nap Transition
[I took notes all week about his wake times, night waking, nap lengths, and want to walk you through the transition so that you can see how it works for a real baby and how a sleep consultant might be able to help you tackle sleep problems.]
I’ve found people are amused to know that sleep consultants are not always cool and certain about their own babies’ sleep. If anything, I find we tend to have a harder time being objective with our own kids and seeing through the haze to do the “right” things. This has never been more evident to me than when I committed to providing an honest, no-sugar-coating log of how the transition went for our family. Sleep consultants have no magic, just a lot of knowledge and experience which allows us to quickly solve sleep problems and keep the hard parts to a minimum for baby and mom.
This week, I wanted to bite the bullet and go from two naps to one. I chose to make the leap to longer wake times cold turkey- I personally don’t like fiddling around with gradual changes, but that is purely my parenting style.
First of all, how did I know it was time to make the change? For us it was a combination of two things:
1) Baby Nate was consistently waking earlier than he used to. We had been waking him for the day at 7:30, and he was starting to wake naturally around 6:45.
2) He forced my hand when he started fighting both nap times. He was pushing and pushing his wake times to a point where I could keep two very short naps a day and have a late bedtime, or just make the jump to a one-nap schedule.
Baby Nate is fourteen months old and on two naps, his schedule looked like this:
Wake 7:30 am
Nap 1 10:30-11:30
Nap 2 3:00-3:30
Bedtime 7:30 pm
On a one-nap schedule, I aimed for it to look like this:
Wake 7:30 am
Nap 12:30 pm-2:30 pm
Bed around 7-7:30 pm
Ready or not, I jumped in on a Monday.
Day 1:
Nate slept until 7:30 am and I was confident this was a good place to start. I wanted him to start on a day when his schedule looked good, if I could help it. This is not always possible, especially if your baby is waking extremely early, but for us, it helped.
He did awesome all morning. He was alert and pleasant until his nap at 12:30 and he napped for a solid two hours! Obviously, I was thrilled and briefly thought I must be a genius and master sleep consultant as I have the perfect child. What a dream- my perfect little angel baby who was just going to transition so smoothly and beautifully and everyone will think I am a perfect, brilliant sleep consultant.
Alas, that confidence was shot as he woke often overnight. He was up once around 9, 11:30, 3:30…
Night wakings are, unfortunately, normal during transitions. You should treat them the way you have always treated night wakings.
For me, it was just a quick check in to make sure everything was fine, give him a quick kiss, and pop back out. His 11:30 wake was a long one and I thought I was an utter failure. Did I make a mistake jumping to one nap? Was it actually too soon? Do I even know anything about sleep?
Day 2:
Nate was a very tired little dude. He woke for the day a little bit early, and was very sleepy by 11 am and I, like many a parent, caved in and put him down for his nap “early” around 12 pm. His nap was broken and fussy.
Again, I was over here thinking I was making a big mistake, this is awful, and way overreacting in my mind to some broken sleep. I often tell my clients to focus on the big picture and not get too stressed about one-off bad naps or bad nights, and to keep their end goals in mind when being consistent feels hard. Maybe I needed a sleep coach to tell me to keep going. What I had was a husband who reminded me that we have weeks to months of quite literally not going anywhere to get this figured out. It’s okay if one day was bad. He was right. [For future readers, this was published deep in the thick of the 2020 Coronavirus stay-at-home orders.]
I put Nate down for the night with a slightly shorter wake time to compensate for what I suspect was some overtiredness on Night 1. I had used a 5 hour wake time the first night, and my older boys had often done better with a bit less, so maybe Nate is the same. So, I used closer to 4.5 hours as my wake window rather than a full 5 hours.
That backfired. My little bud who usually goes right to sleep fussed and fussed and cried and cried and I, like many parents, caved in and nursed him to sleep. I’m a sucker. I know. This may be why I feel uniquely qualified to work with real moms- I am a real mom myself. He slept pretty well overnight with just one little wake up that didn’t require any intervention. But man, what a reminder of how hard it is to stay consistent! Having some accountability would have been nice. Again, I was left with my dear husband who encouraged me to break out of my professional role and go nurse him down. I was trying to treat this as an “ideal” sleep consultant would.
Being a mom is hard! Maybe we file this under a “do as I say, not as I do” scenario.
Day 3:
Nate was much better rested after me having to wake him for the day around 7:30 am.
He napped from 12:20-1:40. Not quite as long as I would have liked, but he slept well and woke pleasant.
After such a train wreck the previous night, I extended his last wake time to closer to 5.25 hours. I knew to do this based on a few details:
1) His extended crying on Night 2. Crying and crying before falling asleep for a sleep trained baby usually means they aren’t tired enough.
2) Before changing from two naps to one, he got around 13.5 total hours of sleep per 24-hour period. If he is sleeping 12 hours overnight, his nap will only be 90-minutes long, and that means he needs to spend a little more time awake during the day.
This matches up just right with his schedule- a shorter nap, about 10-10.5 hours awake each day, and around 12 hours of sleep overnight.
Thus, I added time and put him down after about 5.25 hours for bed. He went right to bed and didn’t make a peep. Success. Further success: he slept well all night aside from one tiny little peep I heard from him in the wee hours. No intervention needed to get him back to sleep.
Day 4:
He woke around 7:15 am and was pleasantly able to hang out until 12:30 for his scheduled nap. Again, his nap was only about an hour and twenty minutes. Might this just be our pattern? Starting to look like it.
Since the previous night we saw success, I put him down for bed about 5 hours and 15 minutes after he woke up from his nap- so just past 7 pm.
He had another sound night! One tiny peep in the 3 o’clock hour, but I’m beginning to think that’s just a part of life because he did that on two naps as well. I’ve begun just turning on my own white noise when that happens. Not so loud that I couldn’t hear him crying loudly if he needed me, but loud enough to drown out his little fusses when he rouses between sleep cycles.
Day 5:
If big brothers hadn’t woken him a little early, I think Nate would have slept right until his new normal of 7-7:30 am. What do I do about an early wake?
That’s a post for another day but the main idea is to just keep him up until his normal nap time. Yes, it may mean that the morning wake time is a bit longer than is ideal. But better to be overtired heading into nap than bed. If you don’t keep baby up until their proper nap time, you start a cycle of everything shifting early and reinforce that early morning: early morning, early naps, early bed, another early morning. You have to break that cycle and something’s got to give- make it the first wake time of the day: early morning, normal nap times, normal bed, normal wake the next day, back on track.
So, there we have it. 5 days, some hard nights and naps, and then smooth sailing. Baby Nate made the leap down to two naps relatively smoothly.
I share our personal experience to show you two things:
1) My baby isn’t a programmable sleep machine and transitions just like other babies. There were some tears (for us both), this mama ended up nursing him down once, and after we survived the bumpiness, everything is great again and my baby is on a more age-appropriate schedule for sleep.
2) This would have been much more challenging on Baby Nate and me [read: many more tears all around] if I didn’t recognize when he was ready for a big change or have an understanding of Nate’s sleep needs, how and when to adjust wake times, when to throw in the towel on extending nap time, and how to balance day and nighttime sleep in a way that is best for my baby.
A sleep coach does not have a magic answer than isn’t already out there on the internet. Truth is, you can read and read and read about almost anything I learned through my certification. There are thousands of websites chock full of sleep advice. But what good is that if your baby falls even a little bit outside the range of “normal?” What if your baby doesn’t sleep well based on the wake times suggested by charts online? What if your baby is ready for one nap earlier than some people recommend? What if your baby isn’t average? A good sleep consultant brings to your family a wealth of experience to combine with that knowledge to help make sleep changes smoothly, aiming to minimize tears and work closely with your family’s goals, parenting style, and the needs of your baby.
