If you think skipping naps will help your baby sleep better at night, you are wrong!

[jessmke]

I've always known that "sleep begets sleep", so we didn't skip naps on purpose it just sort of happened yesterday. Morning nap was late because I had to go out, I had timed it so Isla would nap in the car but she decided not to, so she ended up with a late nap (45 min) on my back in the carrier while I ran errands. We were quite a ways from home, so when afternoon nap time came around I stopped by our cabin and put her down. She played in the pack n play for an hour and refused to fall asleep. OK so I thought we would keep on going with our day and surely she would fall asleep the car, because at this point she had been awake for over 4 hours. Well she did not. So as soon as we got home (5pm) I put her down in the crib for a nap but at this point she was so over tired she was being silly and manic and wouldn't fall asleep. So I got her up and decided on an early bedtime instead. A very naive and optimistic person inside of me thought maybe she will sleep great tonight because she is so tired! Nope, she was up every 1-2 hrs all night long. We will be sticking close to home today so we can both can get caught up on sleep.

 

[Diannam]

I totally agree with this. Days with only one nap for my 9 month old usually result in a fractured sleep with lots of little wake ups. At the moment my baby's afternoon nap is just not happening and not from lack of trying and when he is finally willing it's too close to bedtime.