Eight months is a settled two-nap day for most babies, and it is also when a lot of parents first meet night waking that has nothing to do with the schedule. Crawling, pulling up, and separation awareness all land around now, and they show up at 2am before they show up in the day. Check the windows, then look at development.
Wake at 7:00 AM, 2 naps of about 1 h 40 min each, bedtime at 7:00 PM. Nap times are windows, not deadlines — anywhere inside one counts.
| Part of the day | Clock time | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Wake | 7:00 AM | |
| Nap 1 | 9:45–11:25 AM | 2 h 45 min awake first |
| Nap 2 | 2:25–4:05 PM | 3 h awake first |
| Bedtime | 7:00 PM | 3 h awake first |
The planner adjusts it to your baby's own wake time, bedtime, and birthday — including corrected age if your baby was born early.
The sample day above lands at 3.25 h of daytime sleep and 12 h overnight — 15.25 h in 24. A baby at the bottom of the range who wakes up happy is not short on sleep; the range is wide because babies are.
Two naps generally hold from here until 13-18 months. What changes in the next few months is the length of the wake windows, not the number of naps.
Roughly 2.5–3 hours, with the longest stretch before bed. The Tier-1 bracket for 6–8 months is 120–180 minutes.
The night waking is real; the label is a convention rather than a defined clinical event. It usually coincides with a burst of motor development. It passes, and it is not caused by anything you did to the schedule.
Some do, and the guidance allows 2–3 at this age. If a third nap pushes bedtime past your target, it is usually the one to drop first.
Tier 1 — evidence-based The ranges on this page are the consensus sleep totals and nap counts below. The phrase "wake window" itself is a Tier 2 practice-based heuristic: it does not appear in the pediatric sleep-medicine literature, so treat the window lengths as a starting estimate and let your baby's sleepy cues override them.