Of Naps and Night-Night

J has never been a very good napper since he came home. This last week though has been an exceptionally poor nap week. I try to put him down at the same time every day, twice a day. However, it doesn't always work. Here are the complications:

• He will most always fall asleep in the car, if the ride is longer than 15 minutes. If he does sleep in the car, I am unable to transfer him still sleeping to his crib when we get home. Well, I can put him in there, but he wakes up and wails and refuses to go back to sleep, until maybe in the afternoon if it is morning, or if it is the afternoon, he just never naps again, but will go to bed fine.
• I've tried doing one nap before, but he never sleeps longer than 1 hour 15 minutes, which does not seem like enough nap time to me at his age. Most of his naps last only 30-40 minutes though, which is definitely not enough! They are that short even if it was only 1 per day- either morning, afternoon or mid-day.
  
• Even on days when we are home all day, and I attempt to get two naps in, he still sometimes refuses to take one or the other. Even if I know he is tired because he is whining or rubbing his eyes, or whatever, he just won't give-in.
• During the nap "refusals" he just wails and wails. I go in his room about every 5-10 minutes and comfort him, usually without picking him up, just speaking low saying "it's naps time" or "quiet time", patting his back, laying him back down. He usually is comforted easily, but as soon as I leave the room, he is not happy again. So I will do that for about 45 minutes to an hour in the hopes that eventually he will sleep before giving up.
• Some days he does nap after I go in his room a few times. I consider those good nap days, even though it's not going right to sleep.
  
• The other thing we do is go up to his room for quiet play and book time before attempting to put him in the crib for a nap, so it's not go go go and suddenly nap time.
  

I can't figure out what works well on the good nap days. As far as I can tell, there is no rhyme or reason. Oh well.

The good news is that J sleeps through the night for 11-12 hours, mostly. He is in bed by 8pm every night. We are currently still doing a night time bottle and he usually falls asleep while drinking it. However, even on the nights he doesn't fall asleep from the bottle, he goes down in his crib easily and goes right to sleep. How 8 pm at night in the crib is different from morning or afternoon naps is beyond me.

The one thing that mars his nights some nights is what I believe are night terrors. He will "wake up" wailing, seemingly straight from a sound sleep. Yet, when I go in his room to see what is wrong, he is not actually awake, just crying in his sleep. Some nights he is standing up, clutching the rail, but he is still sleeping. It's actually kinda bizarre. I can usually comfort him which is good, but we've had 2 or 3 episodes where nothing helped, except time. I don't know if these are adoption related or not and I don't know if they are actually night terrors, but that is what I'm calling them.

Sleep issues are a fairly common occurrence post-placement in adoption, so I know we are not alone. I also know that we are blessed that J is sleeping through the night most nights. I just wish naps were going better and that I can find something that will work for him. I know as he gets slightly older, that he will need less sleep, so one nap per day will be better. Not sure exactly which age that should happen though, but when I figure it out and we get there, at least we won't battle for two naps anymore!