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I would definitely try for catnap No. 4. I'd be afraid to do a bedtime any earlier than 6.

If it were me, I'd probably skip solids and go for the bath if he ends up not taking the 4th nap so he'd be down by 5:30ish.

for me personally, the cut off time was 20 minutes, especially with a 4th nap that's hard for them to take anyway because their bodies are not used to taking 4 naps a day. doesn't feel fair to try to force them to!

@NerdBee: 2 hours was a good awake time for Charlie at that age. both he and olive didn't transition to 2 naps until 9 months, Charlie was nap trained at 4.5 months, and Olive at 8 months.

First, Mrs. Bee and Mrs. Yoyo have given you great advice so far. I just wanted to chime in and relay some of our experiences. My LO is almost 8 months and we transitioned to 2 naps at 6.5 months.

At 6 months our waketimes looked something like 2.25-2.5hrs/2/2/2 when he was on 3 naps. I needed a longer waketime in the morning to get a longer nap and then the next 2 naps were usually only 45 minutes. My LO is a pretty good sleeper and can usually fall asleep whenever I put him down regardless of the waketime though (unless I'm way off). We were having issues with long nightwakings in the middle of the night and early wake ups before 6am so I was advised that I should transition to 2 naps. So the next day I changed the waketimes to 2.75/3/3 and we were on 2 naps going forward.

So, some signs of transitioning to 3 naps are:
1) your LO is taking awesomely long naps and there just isn't enough time in the day to squeeze in a 3rd
2) your LO can handle 2.75+hr wake times
3) you have weird stuff happening at night like I did
4) your LO is constantly refusing the 3rd nap regardless of when it starts (my LO only refused naps after 4pm)

I also wanted to add that I'm a huge fan of the early bedtime but we've never gone earlier than 5:30. My LO often sleeps 12+ hrs straight with an early BT!

@NerdBee: Don't know if you've seen this, but I've always found it helpful:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11GHo4keUb2TVJUlSL1kD6HQcEgaNFBmzoQoOzcpcyas/edit?hl=en&authkey=CPXE1bsO&pli=1#

Sorry your day was rough :(. The good thing is that tomorrow is a brand new day!! That was always my motto when it was a horrible day of napping and I was making bad decisions about waketimes and what-not. I would countdown the minutes until bedtime so that we could just start fresh the next day.