Dana: Hi. I’m Dana. Welcome to this week’s video. Today, I want to talk about transitioning from 3 naps down to 2. I get a lot of questions about that particular phase in a baby’s life. It tends to happen around the sixth month mark. Now, that can be a bit tricky because they’re really on the borderline of still needing 3 naps a day, but not really, and sometimes it’s 2, and it gets a little confusing for a lot of moms. I’m going to give you some strategies here today to deal with it. You might find that it’s more like 7 months. It can be even be 8 months before you see these signs, and that’s well within the realm of normal, so don’t worry too much.

The main thing to look for is an increase in stamina. Your baby used to be really tired at the 2-hour mark, and now you’ve noticed that she could probably go 2-1/2, maybe even 3 hours of time awake between each nap. That really has to happen, or it needs to be there in order to make this work because otherwise there’s just going to be too many hours in the day and not enough sleep. We need to look for that.

The second thing to watch for is usually the third nap of the day becomes problematic all of a sudden. It’s been going nicely, and now all of a sudden when you put her down for her third nap, she does a lot of protesting or she’s in there chit-chatting to herself for half an hour before she finally falls asleep. It really confuses the schedule if she falls asleep at 4 and sleeps til 5. It’s going to throw bedtime off, so it gets to be a real frustration point for a lot of moms. If that’s happening I’d say anywhere between 3 and 5 times a week, then that’s a good sign that baby is ready to transition from 3 down to 2.

Another thing that can happen is that the first and second nap get really long, and you’re thinking, “Wow, this is wonderful.” She’s taking a 2-hour a morning nap. She’s taking an hour and a half second nap, and then there’s just not enough time in the later afternoon for that third nap, but there’s too much time before bed. That gets really tricky. What do you do with this baby for the time it takes to get her to bedtime?

If that’s happening, you can do a couple of things. You could hang on to those 2 really great naps that you’re getting and just plan for a third nap to be in the car or the stroller. That would only be roughly a 20 to 30-minute nap, which is pretty typical for any kind of motion sleep. That’ll just help take the edge off enough to get her to her normal bedtime. Then, you may start that transition and build out a little more time between each nap, so that then there’s no more time for the third and you can just go into bedtime.

Now, you may need to move bedtime earlier for the short term. If you’re stretching her out and putting her to first nap around 9:30, second nap around 2:30, and she’s awake by 4, it may be too much of a push to get her to her 7:30 bedtime, for example. For the short term, you can just bump that up to 7 or even 6:30 for, I would say about 4 weeks is a good guideline, and that will give her body enough time to adjust to this change so that she can make it longer. She’s sleeping longer for each nap, and everything’s clicking into place.

Any time you make changes to sleep habits, whether you’re dropping from 3 naps to 2, or 2 naps to 1, or even 1 nap to none, it takes the body clock about 4 weeks, sometimes even 6, to fully adjust to the change. Don’t panic if everything doesn’t click into place right away, and don’t panic if it feels like, “Ah, this is a tough push to get her there,” that it’ll come in time. Once you’ve made the decision to do it, it is better to do it and follow through than to flip-flop back and forth. That will confuse the body clock too much. You really want to set a clear pattern so that the body can get in line with what that new pattern is, and everything will improve much, much quicker.

All right. I hope that helps. Thanks for watching today. Sleep well.