Help! My baby fell asleep before nap time!
There’s nothing like the dreaded car nap in the middle of an awake time to really throw off your entire day, am I right?!
Now, I love a good well-timed car nap even if it means I’m giving up my “break” time for the day! But sometimes, it’s just a necessity with family life.
So how do you handle the day whenever a car nap happens that you weren’t intending to? I’m going to list some general guidelines you can follow as it applies to your child.
If the nap is 10 mins or less, treat it like it didn’t happen and do normal nap time
If the nap is 11-30 mins, push the nap back the amount of time that they slept
If the nap is 30-45 minutes, count it as their nap but do the next nap about 15 to 30 minutes earlier
If the nap is 45+ minutes, count it as their nap and do a normal awake time for the next nap
You also need to be mindful of total awake time. This is the amount of time your child spends awake in the day (added up from all of their wake windows). We want to be within 30 minutes of that each day. So if your child falls asleep early, that shortens their total awake time for the day if you count that as their nap.
We want to maybe add 5-10 minutes to their subsequent awake times in order to get close to their normal amount of total awake time. That awake time is what builds sleep pressure for overall night time sleep.
Example (3 nap schedule, with total awake time around 9 hours usually)
7:00am wake up
8:15-8:45am accidental nap in the car
11-12:00pm nap 2
2:30-3:45pm nap 3
6:00pm bedtime
This is 1.25/2.25/2.5/2.25 = 8.25 hours of total awake time (so not too far off the 9 hours and you’re not overstretching the awake times to get there)
In the same vein, if they split an awake time by taking a nap when they’re not supposed to, that could add MORE total awake time to their day so you’d need to maybe trim 5-10 mins off subsequent awake times.
Example (3 nap schedule with total awake time around 9 hours usually):
7:00am wake up
8:45-9:05am accidental nap in the car
9:35-10:15am nap at home (added 20 mins to their normal nap time/would’ve been at 9:15 if they’d napped at home)
12:45-2:00pm nap 2
4:15-5:00pm nap 3
7:15pm bedtime
This is 1.75/.5/2.5/2.25/2.25 = 9.25 hours of total awake time. You could even do 7pm bedtime to get back to 9 hours total awake time for the day.
So this of course does NOT cover every scenario for every baby but can give you ideas on how to handle those accidental naps that you weren’t counting on happening. Sometimes it takes experimenting to figure things out and know what works/doesn’t work for your little one!
Another totally valid option: just drive around to get in a good nap even if it’s a little off schedule. Enjoy a coffee and some quiet!
