Hello all,
We are at the end of our tether-any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Our Noah is 19+3 months old (in other words, he was born at 27 weeks) and is a complete fidget. He can drop off to sleep independently for his nap, even if he does have to have a chat with himself and a good tour of his cot first.
Bedtime is completely different. We used the baby whisperer method with our first son, Corey, and he is an amazing sleeper. For some reason it just hasn't worked with Noah. His bedtime routine:
7pm: bottle and book...usually he finishes the bottle and won't sit still for the rest of his brother's book.
Upstairs for bath, get into pyjamas, kisses goodnight. Daddy holds him by the window for a few moments before closing the blinds and putting him down in his cot (on the other side of the room). He usually pushes you away to get into the cot, so it's not a fear problem. Daddy leaves the room (which has a white noise machine on) and Noah rolls around, stands up, talks, chats, yells, etc until he eventually starts to cry. Daddy waits to see if he will settle (it has happened once or twice), then goes in, lays him down and pats his back to calm him. He leaves his hand on his back for a bit and then moves away from the cot without leaving the room to see if he'll settle. It takes four or five tries before he falls asleep...this can be 45 minutes to an hour or even more on really bad days.
Schedule:
Up at 6.50, bottle, dressed and changed
Breakfast at 8
Snack at 11
Nap 12-1 (just recently we've dropped the length of his naps. He honestly probably won't need one for much longer)
Lunch at 2
Small snack at 4.30
Dinner at 6.15
Bedtime as above.
His brother falls asleep about thirty seconds after being tucked in, and could do it the same way even if he'd just been trampolining at a party ten minutes previously. We want them to share a room, but the only attempt we made just resulted in a tearful Corey begging to be allowed to sleep. Noah therefore is still in our room. We'd like them to be together sometime by August if we can just sort this out!
He's now a good sleeper once he's down, I should add. He only wakes if there's a solid reason-illness, teething etc.
Any ideas?
Thank you so much for reading all this!
DualTracy and her Amazing Husband
