weird sleep cycles

Cate seems to have gotten herself into a bizarre sleep cycle and I don’t know how to break it. Her schedule used to go like this:

8 a.m. – wake up
Noon-ish: nap for a couple of hours
9 p.m. – go to sleep for the night

That was lovely and totally worked for us. But it seems that since she’s started walking, she’s exerting a lot more energy, so now it’s more like this:

7 a.m. – wake up and play-play-walk-walk-play
10 a.m. – sack out for a nap because DUDE, that was a lotta hard playing
4 p.m. – fall asleep for a second nap because all that playing since the first nap? Exhausting!
10:30 p.m. – sleep? Who needs sleep? I’ve had two naps today, I’m not sleepy at all!
7 a.m. – wake up because now it’s a habit, even though I’m still tired, and I will totally crash in 3 hours

So how on earth do I get her back to a normal one-nap-per-day schedule? I’ve tried only letting her sleep for 15-20 minutes for the second nap, in the hopes that she’ll still be tired enough to go to bed at a reasonable time. It doesn’t really seem to work, though. Any ideas?

Meanwhile, what’s cuter than a baby walking around in nothing but a diaper? Nothing, I say!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Yk6TfEr__s

Things I love about this video:
1. Chubby legs in motion.
2. That she says “uh-oh!” when she first sees her xylophone. As in, “uh-oh, here’s a toy that needs playing with!” And then she proceeds to beat the crap out of it with the wrong end of the stick.
3. That she does the “wave bye-bye” hand motion even though she isn’t actually waving bye-bye at anything. We’ve just been trying to teach her that one, so now she does it all the time.
4. The laugh she does when we play peekaboo on opposite sides of the door. She sounds sort of like a machine gun, and it cracks me up every time.

(A couple more videos here for those who are interested.)

3 thoughts on “weird sleep cycles

  1. I don’t think that this pattern will stick, because almost every baby gets screwy sleep schedules when they learn to walk. She’ll settle back into one nap a day probably in the next week or so.

    But in the meantime, you need some sanity. I think it’s that the second nap is so late in the day. Cut the morning nap short, and see if she’ll go down earlier in the afternoon?

    Good luck! But I think it will work out on its own soon anyway.

  2. Love the video! I don’t think there is a wrong end of that darn stick either since my Miss C seems to enjoy trying to get both ends into her mouth!
    Good luck with the sleep. Miss C went from 4 naps a day to 2 over night (used to be 2 30 minutes in am and two in pm, now its just one in am and one in pm though on occasion she naps for a little longer) so I totally understand the issue! 😉

  3. My advice is in line with Cat’s: try to make the afternoon nap happen sooner by cutting the morning nap pretty short (30 minutes or so). Good luck. Nothing’s fun when the baby isn’t sleeping right.

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