Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The great sleep battle of 2010

Meg has turned from being my champion sleeper to being my champion refuse-to-sleeper. Seriously. It started in the spring. She was probably ready for a big girl bed, but she refused and wanted to sleep in her crib. So when we listed the house, the toddler bed went up into the attic. Naturally, with Bjorn out of the picture and me pressed to keep the house clean, she decided it was time to screw with me. She started throwing herself out of the bed and it was anything I could do to get her to sleep.

Then we went on vacation for two weeks and it just got more complicated. She and Andy would share twin beds next to each other and she did fine, assuming you could get her to go to sleep. It was often lots of bringing her back to her bed, practically begging/threatening/bribing to get her to finally knock off. After the trip, we were at my folks for a few weeks sharing a room with Andy. She was refusing to go to bed and instead would immediately pop out to find us. Even after she finally went to sleep, she'd occasionally wake up and trot through the Jack and Jill bathroom to get to us. Lack of sleep on my part combined with sheer frustration of the situation were making me seriously batty.

Now that we're in the new house, we got a baby gate to keep her in her room. Our bedroom is downstairs and her's is up so I worry about her roaming the halls at night and falling down the stairs. Plus, she really needs to get back to going to bed at a decent time/pace. After a little over a week in the new regimen, the results are mixed. She does eventually go to sleep in her own bed, sometimes with one of us rubbing her back, other times not. Bjorn's apoplectic about it (I'm only marginally less so) as she screams and cries so loud, she also made herself throw up, until she just wears herself down and finally nods off.

Even with that, she's crying out sometime in the early morning (say between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m.) and ending up in our bed. Thoughts on how to fix this, short of simply drinking more?

1 comment:

  1. First, I will proclaim that we are not any type of experts on this since for the past year and a half I have been lying down with him to get him to go to sleep, but we have been trying a new plan to get us out of the room while he falls asleep. We sit in his doorway on the floor while he falls asleep. The first time we tried this (and three or four subsequent nights) he cried, kept getting out of his bed to see us, etc. Each time he got out of bed, we would shut the door (us on the other side) and say that we wouldn't open the door until he was back in bed. This worked because he would rather have the door open than not be able to see us. He would then just whimper in his bed until he finally fell asleep. We have been doing this for about a week and now he stays in bed, doesn't cry and usually doesn't peek more than once to see if we are still there. It has helped that we cut out his nap so he's REALLY tired at night. I only had to sit upstairs for 8 minutes last night for him to fall asleep. Soon, we'll let him know that we are in another room while he goes to sleep--I expect that this will lead to him getting out of bed, crying and so on, but hopefully with baby steps we can get to the point of him going to sleep by himself.

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