u/Bubbies0618

Hello fellow parents of Reddit! I am looking for your stories on how you handled your babies' nap transition.

I'll try to keep this as brief aa possible, but for the past few months (currently 14 months old) my baby has been hopping between 1 and 2 naps. It has been consistently 1 nap for a long time with a 2 nap day maybe once every couple weeks so it seems he is ready to go down to 1. The problem is, he always wants his nap right away in the morning and I have been following his lead all this time to let him naturally fall into a sleep schedule. So this creates a very long wake window for before bed and it seems to catch up with him and he sort of crashes into a couple 2 nap days to catch up.

His rough schedule is wake up time between 5am-6am, nap somewhere between 9am-10am (he sleeps for about 1.5 hours) then he is up until 6:30pm. Bedtime feels early, but he can't make it past that because he is getting up from nap at 10:30/11:30. His overnight sleep is spotty. On good nights he wakes every 3 hours for a feed. On bad nights, he is up every 2 hours needing me to soothe him. He does feed to sleep and we're looking at slowly backing off of that with having dad putting him to bed. We still cosleep and for the most part happy with it.

I offer him a nap a few times between 2 and 4pm, waiting 45 minutes between attempts but he refuses most the time.

I just want to do the right thing for him and am struggling deciding if I need to intervene to help him break his early morning nap habit or if I wait it out and see if he pushes his morning wake window longer naturally.

Things are going well right now with my 14 month old, even while going through sleep regression and another tooth emerging.

We are just sort of in a rut though, or at least i feel i am. We do the same things mostly everyday. I know routine is important, it's not about disrupting routine but instead adding valuable activities. We do meals and snacks, play, read books, visit grandma, nap, go outside, sing songs. We go to the park about 2 or 3 times a week, stroller walks almost every day. Most of his play time is running around while holding my hands for balance or being carried around pointing at things and naming them. He doesnt walk on his own yet but would rather me walk him around than play with toys or drawers of things in the kitchen.

I've got him new toys like shape sorter, gardening toys and wooden puzzles. He likes them for about 30 minutes at a time then wants to walk or be carried around. This has kind of been the main thing for a few months and I just can't think of new things to do with him or even if I should be introducing new things to build new skills. Mostly static in this sleep deprived brain of mine these days.

I just don't want to be missing doing something that's going to benefit his development. I guess I'm the kind of person who feels like getting comfortable means we need to change things up. Haha