Does 'let sleeping babes lie' apply to toddlers???

DD is almost 20 months, some days goes without a day sleep and is in bed by 6.30pm. Somedays she sleeps in the arvo and then is awake till 9.30pm or later.....which is not on for us.
She is up at 6 ish regardless.
She is asleep now and has been for almost two hours.....so she is going to be up till goodness knows what time! :wall:
Im wondering if i should start trying to keep her awake in the day, which is totally against what i would normally do, or waking her up after an hour or so, so that she will be in bed by atleast 8pm.
I have work i need to do in the evenings and that two/three hours after she is in bed is so valuable to me. WWYD???

When DD#1 sometimes (on the odd occasion) has a sleep - I limit it to an hour. Definitely! Unless of course she is sick :)

we had similar issues with DD and in the end came to a compromise...

some days she has a nap, but she is woken up by 4pm no matter what (unless we are going out for dinner and can handle her being awake until 10pm lol).

and on the days that she does go without a sleep i just have a 'quiet time' set aside where she can just read some books or watch a charlie and lola DVD. then she is back on track and in bed by 7pm.

she is a bit older though, but again, has been doing this for a few months...

HTH!

I would wake her after an hour or so, DS is the same if his day sleep goes beyond 2 hours I always waking him up after around 1 3/4 hours :)

We cut out DS' nap at about the same age...he was worse though, if he had a nap he got such a recharge from it he would be up until 10pm-10.30pm without fail. DH and I couldn't stand it.

We found that in the early days of cutting out the nap, there were some days DS just couldn't get through the day and needed his nap because he was too tired and cranky, but gradually 4 days with a nap became 3 days, became 2 days, became 1 day then maybe once a fortnight he would need a nap and so on - like a watch that needed re-setting! This was easy enough to live with, having him up late wasn't such a pain if it wasn't EVERY day.

For a while there, while he was getting used to not having a nap, on the days he didn't have a nap I would give him his main meal at lunchtime and he would have toast or something for dinner (by 5pm at the latest) otherwise he was too tired to eat properly. And because I knew he'd had a decent meal in the middle of the day I was more relaxed if he was a bit too tired and cranky to eat well in the evening. We did find bathtime could be a bit fraught if he was very tired so within reason we did handle him with kid gloves between 5pm and 6pm, because he would be so tired at that point that if he started crying he wouldn't stop till he was asleep.

We found that by cutting out the nap DS was actually getting MORE sleep. If he didn't have a nap he was getting 12 hours sleep and would generally sleep through. If he did have a nap, he was only getting 9 hours sleep, and would wake up during the night. That was enough to convince us that we were doing the right thing.

thanks, curly, i think thats what DD is trying to do, its just the transition period that is hard!!! she has just gone about half an hour ago. hope she will sleep ok tonight as she seems to wake up more the later she goes down!

Going through the same thing now with DD2. After this evening's debarcle it is now official "no more naps". As much as I love the hour or so of peace in the day time it is so not worth the dragged out bedtime routine. If she is dead tired, then she can nap during a car trip, but I will be waking her up. Oh saying that she can still have a nap at childcare, she is so busy there that is pretty tired of an evening thankfully.

With my first we went through this as well and we left it naps to being only at childcare as well. Just seemed to be enough to recharge her for the rest of the week.