This week on extreme nap-time makeover...

Over the last couple of weeks, Hollie's sleep has been in a bit of a downward spiral.  It's hard to say how it started.  She started sleeping later in the mornings, sometimes as late as 9.  She used to normally take a nap around noon or 1:00, but when she sleeps late, that's pretty much impossible.  Then 3 or 4 rolls around and still no nap, and Daniel gets home from work which is by far the best part of our day, so napping is out of the question at that point.  One of two things happens after that:

1. She crashes right before (or during) dinner, sleeps for an hour until I wake her up, and then stays up until  11 or so, and sleeps until 9 the next morning.
2. She gets really tired and grouchy right around dinner time, but gets her wild-child second wind and sprints in circles around the house until about 11, and sleeps until 9 the next morning.

In my "current condition", I am loving staying in bed until 9am.  It's the staying up until 11pm that I can't do.  And neither can Daniel, with work in the morning.

In order to reset our sleep patterns, I'm going to try waking her up a little earlier in the morning.  I didn't like the idea at first, because you never really know what you're going to get when you wake up a toddler.  Sometimes she's furious, sometimes she's groggy and clingy, and sometimes she looks at you and bursts out laughing like you just told the funniest joke she's ever heard. 

We tried it yesterday.  I woke her up at about 7:45.  It was probably a bad idea to try this on the weekend, because spending the whole day with Daddy was just too much fun for a nap to be possible (this really is all Daniel's fault, isn't it?).  She ended up crashing at about 4, and was up until 10 or so.  Not much improvement.

This morning I woke her up at 7.  We'll see how it goes...

Also, we're (I'm) going to work on a nap-time routine that is similar to bed-time.  For some reason we've never done a nap-time routine before.  With our unpredictable schedules, she's just fallen asleep when ever, where ever...which is obviously not working anymore.  It's time.

Update: Went into the room to read some books a little before 2, and asleep by 2:20.  Win!