2 months ago we did wi/wo with great succes. After only 2 days our son got the message and slept through from 7pm till 7am only waking up once around 11pm to get some water from his sippy cup. This lasted a couple of weeks and stopped when we started packing our apartment into boxes as we had to move. He off course detected that something was going on and at the same time he caught a cold that hung on for 4 weeks.
Then we moved to the countryside to live in a big old house. This is new to all of us as we used to live in a 2 room apartment in the capitol of Denmark, Europe. Also my son had to leave daycare and it will probably be a couple of months before he starts in a new daycare. Of course this is all big changes for a 2-year old.
So his sleeping has been affected by this a lot. From the time we started packing the old apartment into boxes till now. It has now been 5 weeks. As i told you before he also caught the cold bad for 4 weeks up until one week ago. He has had nights where he woke up crying every hour, just like when he was 0-9 months old (he never has been a great sleeper
). But now finally he is only waking up 1-3 times a night.
My son has always been sleeping in our bedroom (because we only had one bedroom in the apartment we just left) and we decided from day one in the new house that he would not go sleeping in his new room right away as that would probably be to much on top of the moving and stopping daycare.
1-3 night wakings we can live with for a while and I'm just writing about all this to explain what I think started all this. The problem now is his sippy cup. We gave it to him about 6 months ago and after a while he learned to drink from it when he woke up thirsty during the night without having to wake us. But now he wants his father or me to be there, whenever he gets thirsty and needs to drink from his sippy cup - at bedtime and during the night. At bedtime as soon as I (or my husband) leave the bedroom he starts chanting his word for thirsty over and over and over again. It really sounds like a mantra and we try not to go in there and disturb him as we hope he will go to sleep chanting his mantra. But he can go on for over an hour and eventually we get too annoyed and also feel sorry for him so one of us goes to the bedroom and almost always find him sitting in the bed right next to his sippy cup just waiting for us to enter. Then he takes one quick sip of water puts the cup back and lies down looking very tired and satisfied. I put the covers over him, tell him that I love him and it's sleepy time (just as I tell him when doing wi/wo) and leave the room. But the second I leave the room he starts chanting again. Every once in a while he also tries chanting his word for food; slippers; mom; dad or even granny but always returns to thirsty... It usually takes him 1 - 1 1/2 hours to go to sleep so he ends up sleeping around 8.30pm instead of 7pm.
I have tried leaving the bedroom as soon as I se him sitting there reaching for his sippy cup as I enter. He then gets really unhappy cries and puts the cup back without drinking or just sits there with it in his hands. He will only drink and then lie down if I stay the whole time...
So now I'm thinking the sippy cup has become a prop and maybe we need to ween him from it? I'm thinking this as he only takes a very small sip of water and it seems to me that it's more about a need for attention than thirst. But then again when he wakes up during the night he really seems to be thirsty and drinks a lot. So if we take away the cup at bedtime how do we handle the night time thirst?
I'm sorry this has become so long as I've just been writing my thougths down as they came to me. Having tried sleeping all night for two whole weeks following our wi/wo success I'm longing to get back to that again. So I'm really hoping you can make sense of my scriblings and help me
