Separation anxiety = no nap?

[botfish]

Hi!  New to the board.  I have a 21 month old and he has been a champ of a sleeper for almost the whole time.  But for the past couple days, he just refuses to nap and goes down horribly at night too.  He is fine if I am with him, but once I leave the room it turns in HYSTERICAL crying.  So I go back in, calm, leave.  Repeat this process.  It is now 1:00 PM and I have been doing this since noon.  But this is day 3 w/o a nap and he used to go down with no problems and would sleep for 2-3 hours.  I am not sure what to do.  Any words of advice???   I am due with another in late June and just cannot deal with two bad sleepers then. 

Jen
Dylan 4/11/04

[tylersmommy]

Can you post his daily routine? Sometimes a bit of tweaking there can help. With us, it was just a phase Tyler went through. It started around 20 mo and has continued off and on since then. He'll go for a couple of weeks of napping off and on, then a couple of normal weeks. If he chooses not to nap, that's fine, but we enforce quiet time in his room for at least an hr (easy since he's still in the crib, but if yours isn't, it can still be done). We did the exact same thing for the crying...in and out, in and out. It helped us a lot to have a "goodnight phrase" that we always used to settle him. When he cried, we'd try to verbally reassure him from outside the door first with the phrase (for us, it was just "night night, Tyler"). If it didn't work, we'd let him see us in the doorway and repeat the phrase. If he still wouldn't settle, we'd go to his crib, lay him down (if needed), rest a hand on him for a few seconds, and repeat the phrase. Then leave as soon as he settled. It was just a phase, and he got past it. Be sure to post back with his routine, sometimes there's an easier fix there!

[elfin]

Is he sick at all or coming down with something?  The first time Myles did this, refusing to nap and becoming hysterical, I was going crazy trying to figure out what it was.  Finally after 2-3 days I took him to the doctor just to make sure, and he had an ear infection in both ears .

Just a thought.

[botfish]

Thanks for the replies!  Here is Dylan's schedule (approx):
7 - wake & play
7:15 - breakfast
7:45 - 12:00 - play, errands, walks, etc
12:00 - lunch
12:30 - 12:45 - around that time he goes down for a nap
2:30-3:00 - around this time he wakes
the rest of the afternoon is spent reading, playing and so on...we do lots of different stuff each day
6:45 - bath
7:00 - Read stories
7:30 - bedtime

He just got over a cold and a major round of teething...all 4 canines came in at once!  Ouch.  And he is still in his crib.  If her weren't, I would have a kid wandering the house the crack of dawn!

Jen

[tylersmommy]

Hmmm...his routine looks great, so I don't think that's the issue. Do you put him to bed any earlier when he skips his nap? We quickly learned that Tyler needs to go to bed at least 1 hr earlier on days he doesn't nap, even if he doesn't seem tired. If we stick with his normal bedtime, we get into a vicious cycle of overtiredness that compounds the problem. Just a thought.