If you put him to bed later, does he sleep later? I would not be putting him down after 3 hours at that age. I would aim for at least 4 hours- but based on your timeframe I would probably even try to push it to 5 hours. Then see what happens.
Like jesseybell said, my suggestion is to push the morning nap start time from 9 to 10 and then eventually try to get to 11-ish. I would do this in a series of 15-30 minutes increments whatever works best for your son. Also, I think you should push nightime bed time to 7:30 or maybe 8 to try to get him to sleep later in the mornings and thus better last until the later morning naptime.
I had both my kids on 1 nap per day by 12 months by doing the incremental methods I mentioned. I got most of my ideas about sleep and napping from the Ferber book and both kids continue to be great sleepers and nappers to this day (3.5 & 18m.). However, my DH and I are nap nazis and insist on naps, schedules and bedtime routines as much as possible where sleep is concerned.
Mine also started fighting the afternoon nap around 16 months. I pushed the AM nap up by 15 min increments. (I moved it up 15 min, then left it at that time for a few days, then pushed it up another 15 min. and so on). It ended up pushing the afternoon nap waaaay late for awhile (they still needed it and would eventually fall asleep for an hour or so), and then I had to push bedtime later (8pm). It did have the benefit of eventually pushing their wake up time later, though!
They were on 1 nap by 17 months. It was a little earlier than it is now (~11:30-2:30pm vs ~1-4pm). And I had to be really careful for a couple of months not to take them on any car rides or long stroller rides between 9:30-11:30 or one or both of them might fall asleep too early.
Honestly, one long nap is awesome! I love it. It is so much easier to plan our days, get out and about in the mornings, and I know I (almost) always have a nice, solid block of time (~3 hrs!) where they are both asleep in the afternoon. Good luck!
Thanks everyone! I am going to try pushing the morning nap 15 minutes later on Monday and see where that takes us. I really don't mind a later bedtime, it would be better for us and if it has the benefit of a later morning wake up, I'll take that too!
Instead of having "answers" on a math test, they should just call them "impressions," and if you got a different "impression," so what, can't we all be brothers?
Well, I thought I'd update, because we're still on mostly 2 naps a day at 20 months old.
Since April, we've been on vacation twice, for a total of at least 5 weeks and with the time differences it's been hard to get G to get a good number of hours of sleep at night. I'd say we lost about a month in May and another month in July in terms of getting adjusted to local time and back to home time.
Our bedtime has moved later, which is fine by me, it gives my husband more time when he gets home from work. We used to have dinner around 6:30 and then go for a walk for about an hour to tire G out, it worked great. He'd sleep until at least 6 in the morning, which is late for him! On the days when he only has one nap, I noticed his night time sleep was worse, more waking in the night, so we cut back on our outings during the day and are sticking to 2 naps. I don't mind as I actually like the time off during the day, but it's getting to be a pain to register for activities, as they're all during the morning nap time of 9 to 11. I am hoping to wean him off the morning nap by his second birthday, but we'll be moving (I hope) and I am sure it's going to disrupt everything all over again, so we'll see.
Thanks for all of the advice, I still may use it, eventually, lol.
Instead of having "answers" on a math test, they should just call them "impressions," and if you got a different "impression," so what, can't we all be brothers?
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