Naps, the ongoing saga
I recently decided to start moving the boys towards one nap a day. This is what happens when you are a stubborn person with twins, you like to be the one that controls the process as much as possible. Fully knowing that all of my plans may go up in smoke with the slightest twist of one or both of their cute little noses. But this is what I do. We also have two family vacations approaching and it would be a lot easier if we have dealt with this now instead of them wanting to lead the charge in the midst of being away from home for a week in a different time zone.
Last week we started letting them sleep in and not waking them at 6:00 AM any longer. We’ve had a few days where they made it all the way until 7:00, very cool. I cut their one hour morning nap down to 45 minutes by keeping them awake for 15 minutes longer (9:45 - 10:30 AM) and then moved their afternoon nap up by 15 minutes to 1:45 instead of 2:00 PM.
This week I am putting them down for the morning nap at 10:00 AM and continuing to wake them at 10:30 AM. I’m hoping this will keep them tired and move up the afternoon nap to 1:30 PM. Yesterday that worked for Forest but Logan talked and played quietly in his crib for 30 minutes before falling asleep. I am keeping the afternoon nap to 1.5 hours so that they also get used to staying up longer in the afternoons. I plan to hold this pattern for two weeks to let them get used to it but also because Brad is going to be gone all next week for work. I’m not prepared to handle total meltdown because of nap changes all by myself.
My “plan” in two weeks is to eliminate the morning nap completely and begin the process of stretching them until an afternoon nap. Maybe a half hour each week, but who knows. That’s where/when it’ll get tricky. Hopefully I can take them to the gym, run errands, go for walks, play at the park, and find other ways to keep them stimulated enough to start getting used to this change. My understanding is that they probably will not take long afternoon naps at first and that we’ll need to put them to bed early to make up for the lost sleep. If two weeks goes by without this feeling right, then we’ll go back to this weeks schedule, a quick morning nap (30 minutes) to recharge followed by a long afternoon nap (1.5 - 2 hours). As always, I’ll keep you posted.
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