17 month old dropping naps entirely! Yikes!

[whitneyg]

My daughter is nearly 18 months and has recently been going all day without a nap at least twice a week.  It is killing me.  Is this happening to anyone else?  I give her all kinds of opportunities to fall asleep when she seems tired, but no luck.  As the day wears on she gets more and more cranky, and so do I.  She is obviously tired, but won't fall asleep.  I should also add that on the days she does nap, she sleeps for 2-3 hours, so it seems like she still needs the rest.  Is this happening to anyone else?  What do I do?

Edited by whitneyg - 5/13/11 at 2:44pm

[tabrizia]

DD gave up naps around that age.  It was a bit of a transition, but she really didn't seem to need them.  If she had a nap she would be up till sometime between 10pm and midnight, if she didn't she went to bed happily by 8.  That being said the days she did nap she would still sleep for 2 to 3 hours, she didn't reduce the amount of time she slept during naps when she cut them out, she just stopped napping.

That being said, I think it is fairly common around 18ish months for children to have a nap strike and then happily go back to napping again.  So that maybe what is happening as well.  In our case,  I never preventing DD from napping and always offered her the oppertunity to nap, but she wasn't interested and her not napping made our evenings a lot more happy for everyone so I didn't push her to continue to nap either.  Then again I also had a 3 year old who didn't nap at the point she was giving up naps, so I wasn't losing any downtime either.  I did fight DS a bit longer about napping when he tried to give them up at 2 1/2, just because I enjoyed the break.