Dana: Hi, I’m Dana. Today I want to talk about how to transition from three naps down to two. This has been a really popular question lately so I think it deserves a little bit of a chat. This one can be really tricky and I find that most babies around the six month mark start to show signs of dropping to two naps but the tricky part is that sometimes they need three and sometimes it feels like two and there’s lots of back and forthing going on on your part and you’re really not sure what’s going on. I want to give you some signs and tips today for how to watch and make the decision that your baby is ready. One thing is that their stamina improves, so you’ve been putting this baby down every hour and a half to two hours but now you’ve noticed that they’re not really seeming all that tired when you put them down or it’s taking twenty minutes or longer for baby to fall asleep once she is in the crib.

If anything takes longer than twenty minutes, that’s usually a good sign that you need to start waiting a little longer between naps. The other thing to watch for is that often morning nap becomes really nice and long. Your getting two, two and a half hour morning naps and then the timing gets a little tricky the rest of the day and you feel like, well there’s not really time for a third nap anymore because that big morning nap has pushed the whole day down. That would be a good sign that it’s time to transition.

Another sign might be that second nap or third nap, usually the third nap is getting a lot of protest, right? You try to put baby down for this third nap they just cry right through it or they play and cry and do sort of an alternating between the two for an hour or more, by the time they do fall asleep now you’re wondering well what do I do now? Do I wake her up because it’s almost bedtime? It get’s really really tricky, so those are some of the common signs that you’ll start seeing when your baby’s ready. The hard part is stretching them to get to two naps so it’s going to mean that you are going to have to push them a little bit.

Now, I talk a lot about over-tiredness, a lot in the Sleep Sense program and these videos I warn you about it constantly and so a lot of people are super nervous to make this step because they are concerned they are going to push their baby into over-tiredness. You might for the short term but we don’t want to push too hard because that’s going to backfire. We want to do a gentle push, so I suggest that you step into this slowly. If she used to go two hours between naps then we are going to push it to two hours and fifteen minutes for about three or four days. See how she’s doing with that, give her body time to adjust, then we’ll push it to two hours and a half between naps and see how she’s doing with that, then two forty-five, then three and stop at three and see how she’s doing.

Give it about a week, again, the body clock needs time to catch up and adjust even to small change. Give it about a week before you decide if it’s working or not and move in that direction. Now, the trouble often is that the second nap isn’t long enough. Let’s say you put her down at two o’clock for the second nap and by three o’clock she’s awake. Now you’re thinking she’s got to wait till seven for bedtime, that’s a lot of time to kill before we get to bedtime and she may need a little cat nap sometime around the dinner hour. Maybe the five o’clock hour. You take her out in the stroller for twenty minutes or the car for twenty minutes and just give here a little bit of a cat nap, anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes would be just fine to take the edge off a little bit and carry her through until her bedtime.

Now, let’s say she doesn’t sleep. You tried the walk and she just didn’t sleep now you’re wondering what should I do about bedtime? You can always move bedtime earlier for the short term. She could be in bed for six o’clock. I’ve even had kids, I’ve told Mom to put them down for five-thirty bedtime. I mean, really there’s no such thing as too early for bed if it’s a choice between you know pushing her into over-tiredness or having an oddly timed nap. Earlier bedtime is always my first choice. Now, that’s not where it’s going to stay. I promise you you’re not going to have a five-year-old still going to bed at five-thirty in the afternoon. It’s just for the short term until her body adjusts until naps get nice and long and then we can start moving her bedtime to a more appropriate time which would roughly be seven, seven-thirty.

It does take about four weeks for a body clock to adjust to this change, so don’t jump the gun. Don’t second guess yourself, if you’ve tried for a few days and it doesn’t seem like it’s working, it’s tempting to go back into three naps but once you’ve made the decision to move to two, then just go for it, just see it through, give her body time to adjust and it’ll all fall into place. I find going back and forth just confuses the body clock and it’s not going to make the situation better for anybody. Okay, so I hope that helps you today. Thanks for watching. Sleep well.