Hello! This is my first time posting to this board, so I'll quickly introduce myself before asking my question. I am a first time mom - my husband and I have a 12 month old boy, and I am able to stay home with him. He sleeps in the same room as us, but in his crib. He isn't walking yet, but seems to be on the cusp of standing on his own. He is a very active baby, with a huge sense of curiosity, so he loves exploring and getting into just about everything! He is very mellow in terms of his mood most of the time, though. He is the happiest kid ever! Except when it comes to sleeping...
Currently, he is fighting sleep with every ounce of his being, it seems. Naps, bedtime, middle of the night... He will start crying as soon as we start getting ready for naps or bed, and will not sit still for a story or anything. I nurse him, but as soon as he's done he starts fussing. I try to rock him and hold him (used to work) - he cries and tries to get out of my arms. Singing, humming, softly speaking - crying. I get into his crib with him and he will occasionally fall asleep (which is wonderful!!), but most of the time he will continue to cry or start screaming as if he was in pain! I try to nurse him while in the crib and it doesn't seem to help at all. It is so awful, I don't know what to do! I feel like he can NOT calm himself down to sleep, and I can't seem to do the trick either! While I'm laying there sometimes it seems better if I sing or speak and rub his back, sometimes it seems better if I do absolutely nothing, but it is so painful to feel powerless when he is crying right next to me. A lot of times he will start to fall asleep and as soon as his eyes close he starts crying. If the singing/not singing stuff doesn't work, the only thing that will usually make him stop crying is if I give up on trying to get him to rest and we go play.
I've tried seeing if he's ready to switch to one nap only, and he only napped for 1 hr in the middle of the day and was a wreck with a very short fuse for the rest of the day, and was waking about 5 times at night. At bedtime, he will fall asleep much more easily, but still does NOT like the process of getting ready for bed. We've tried taking him into bed with us, instead of getting into bed with him, but he gets so jazzed up that he just plays with our faces or tries to escape the bed. I feel like I don't know how to help my own son, and it's heartbreaking. Maybe he is ready to
start transitioning to 1 nap, and just needs to go very slowly toward that?
Our routines are usually:
Naps - talk to him about going to take a nap, holding and cuddling him, and then we walk in our bedroom and sit down to look through some books (he likes to be the one to flip through the pages). We do that for a few minutes, and I start singing softly and nurse him. Sometimes he gets sleepy, sometimes his eyes are WIDE awake the whole time. He usually decides he's done, sits up, and tries to escape. This is usually when the crying starts
Bedtime - we start 1/2 hour before bedtime with a bath (it doesn't always seem like a relaxing thing for him - he's usually standing trying to turn the faucet knobs, which he doesn't like being re-driected from), then into the bedroom for a new diaper and a gentle massage (he has excema on his legs so we generally put cream on at night), singing, pajamas, a book (though we may be phasing this out since it seems to jazz him up), and nursing. We talk to him about going "night-night" and lay him down. He usually fusses and I get in bed with him and he's usually out within about 15 min. So it's much easier for him to get to sleep at night (at first) than in the day time, or during his night wakings.
He started out being a very "good" sleeper - almost to the point of being scary when he was a newborn (we had to wake him up for almost every single feeding, or he would go upwards of 5 hours between and was losing weight). Since he was born, sleeping has slowly become harder and harder for him. I figured this would happen to some degree, but lately, I feel completely at a loss as to how to help him sleep!
For a while now he's had a pretty consistent schedule of waking around 5:30-6:00am (6am is on a very good day), napping at 8-9am (for about 1.5-2 hrs), napping again around 1-2pm depending on when he woke up (for another 1.5-2hrs), and going to sleep at 7:30 or 8pm.
For the last few months he has been waking up 2-3 times at night, sometimes screaming bloody murder (which we think may be night terrors, but it's really hard to tell if he's asleep or awake), sometimes fussing, and sometimes just wide awake for an hour or two.
So I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Not in my unwilling-ness to let him CIO (though when I can't stop his crying, it feels like I'm letting him CIO which is heartbreaking), but more that I feel like there's something I'm doing/not doing that's making things harder for him somehow. When he was 8-9 months he was able to put himself to sleep almost completely on his own. I would put him down drowsy and he would just kick his leg for a few minutes until he fell asleep. That was for both naps and bedtime. For awhile he was only waking one time to eat, then back to bed until 7am. Now he wakes several times, sometimes just wanting to be awake, and is up for the day at 5:30am - and can NOT put himself to sleep at all. I don't mind getting up with him a few times at night, if it's just for a few minutes at a time. When he's up for an hour or two wide awake at 2 am, that's what I'd like to change. I'm so frustrated with myself thinking that I'm sure he's trying to tell me something and I'm clearly just not picking up on it!
I apologize for the length of this, and the scattered feeling - I just feel at a loss right now and hoped someone might have either encouraging words, or some advice.
