Almost 3 years old. Still waking a few times at night. Help!

[Meishan]

My daughter is turning 3 in 3 months time. 2 big issues.
1st - she only wants me when she wakes up at night rather than daddy.  I'm probably due at the end of this month with the second child. My husband tries to let me rest while he takes over night duty but the moment my daughter sees him, she cries even harder. She and daddy are the best playmates. But when she needs to be soothe at night, it's always mummy since young.  I never latch her since she was a few months old, so daddy does helps with night feeds last time. But since she got older it just became a preference for mom over dad. Any advice on this? Or this is just a preference issue?  She will asks daddy to go out when she is getting ready for bed. But we did a slow transition and now she is ok wih dad in the room, even getting him to do the story reading. But that's about it.  Night wakings, she will keep crying for me.

2nd - She doesn't sleep through the night until now! She will talk in her sleep, sometimes nightmare? And she will cry and wake up. Cry even harder because I'm not next to her. So I will go to the room and pacify her if she can't settle back to sleep on her own. This happens every single night. We thought she overstimulates by playing too much during the day with her nanny's family, but during weekends we are aware and we do not overstimulate her. She still cries at night.  She sleeps from 9.30 pm to almost 8 am.  1 hour after she slept, she will start crying and wake up. Subsequently a few hours later it happens again. Sometimes she cries and then starts to kick both her legs. She didn't say her legs hurt or anything so I don't know why she does that.  I'm just wondering is it normal for some
Children to have more dreams at night and hence more night wakings rather than sleeping deeply?

[michaeljacknnugg]

Ouch, hard work!

Can I ask a few questions?
How much night sleep does she have in total? Do you think she is perhaps overtired? That can cause night waking.
What do you do when she wakes?
Does she have all her teeth yet?

My DS was hard work at nights at age 2 but once the teeth were through I was much more insistent on him doing everything he could to self settle since I could rule out pain.

[Meishan]

Her teeth are all out. We thought she may be overtired too. But weekends she is with us the whole day so we know what she did and we never overstimulate her. Yet the constant night wakings continues. She wakes at 7plus, 8am, then naps from about 1pm for 2 hours, bedtime at 9plus pm. Bedtime routine - milk, brush teeth, bedtime stories, lights off. But I stay with her till she falls asleep.

When she wakes up at night, sometimes she is still dreaming and crying, other times she wakes up and realised she is alone and starts crying for me, or she seems to have leg cramps and will kick her legs and cries. I forgot to mention my daughter is slightly monoparesis affecting her left leg. She has a very small cyst in the right frontal lope affecting her left leg mobility. I massage her legs every night because they tend to use a lot of energy for the affected limb. Also she has slightly large tonsils, she got tonsils stones twice before and her doctor suggests I bring her to the ENT specialist to check it out.

So I really have no idea what is the cause of her night wakings. The moment she sees me, if she isn't having nightmares, she will go back go sleep immediately, if she had a bad dream she cries very hard and will ask me for hugs and then tries to go back to sleep. Sometimes she seems to be still dreaming when she cries and I have to call her name a few times before she stops crying.

Any idea what is wrong or what I should do to help her sleep better?  The good thing is she isn't affected by her night sleep. She wakes up a happy girl in the morning and will come to our room to look for us on her own. She also isn't cranky or tired. She is quite a textbook/angel baby. Very happy girl.

[michaeljacknnugg]

Ah, thanks for that info. My guy is low sleep needs so forgive me if I'm off, but that actually sounds like an awful lot of sleep for her age. Is it possible that she is undertired instead?

A lot of children have dropped their nap by age 3 (my guy by 2.5) and are doing well on 11-13 hours of total sleep in any 24hr period. It looks like she's on about 12 hours? It might be time to consider capping her nap.

Also, does she ever go to sleep independently? I think if not this is something you could work on so that when she wakes at night she knows how to settle herself back to sleep.

[Meishan]

Really too much sleep..? We never thought of that.. I should go read on transition to dropping the nap. And sleeping independently. I'm still accompanying her till she falls asleep. thank you for your help.

[cath~]

Hi there and ((hugs))

I agree with PPs suggestion to work on independent sleep at BT. It is very common and normal for toddlers to wake during the night but if they can fall asleep by themselves at BT then they're less likely to need us when they wake during the night.

If your LO hasn't settled independently before the gradual withdrawal is prob the best way to go. This is explained more here:

How do you settle your LO to sleep at the moment?

If she gets 12hrs sleep per day (is that right?) then that sounds fine to me and I'd be surprised if it's too much although a 2hr nap might be too much day sleep. It might be time to think about cutting back on the nap a bit (and lengthening her nights) but IIWM I would prob work on independent sleep first before changing routine to avoid changing too many things at once and not knowing where you are..

HTH x

[michaeljacknnugg]

Apologies, I did mean too much DAY sleep (that's what you get for typing on a phone!) - it's possible that her nap is cutting into her nights.

Independent sleep should really help, though. And I agree with Catherine that it's what I'd tackle first.