Hello wise and lovely ladies,
I have finally decided to do this post for DS sleeping habits. Probably I should just stop worrying and accept that DS is done that way. But every time I read of toddlers sleeping 12h non stop I strongly desire DS is one of them. Unfortunately he isn't.
For the first 9mo of his life he was an horrible sleeper. After introduction of solids he started to show some signs he could to better. He is sleeping with a pattern that I can survive with (with many help of DH, mainly DH doing nights actually) only since he is 16mo.
Now usual day is:
wu: 7 or 7:30 am
nap: 1-3pm
bt: 8pm
We are on a solid 1 nap routine since no longer than 1-2 months. So he lost his beloved am nap very late.
But we qualify a good night when there is one resettle at 5 or 6am. Bad nights have more than one resettle and usually happens when he is ill. Or teething. Or any other excuse you can imagine of. And he is prone to early wu.
Why, on the earth, he cannot sttn? From the beginning of this year he sttn 12 times. Yes, I count them, yes I am a FTM obsessed by DS sleep.
His nw are not so bad, great majority of times he just need a cuddle from daddy or a paci replug or drinking some water.
He usually goes to sleep like a charm, recently he started again to fall asleep instantly when in bed, both nap & BT. He actually asks to go to sleep when he is tired. He is not very prone to OT and he is able to self regulate himself quite well. But his sleeps goes in long waves, sometimes even 10 days long. So we have a negative wave in which he sleeps less than 10.5h at night and he does not recover in nap (less than 2h) then he moves into a positive wave, where he is recovering sleep and he does even 11.5h at night and he naps more than 2h.
Probably during weekend DH and I stimulate him too much and the fact that we both work full day may push him to want to stay with mommy and daddy as much as he can. In fact recovery days usually starts on Monday or on Tuesday when he is with his Granny. He has 4/5 deays of recovery and then if we're lucky he is back to 11h nights and 2h (or just less) naps. If we're unlucky a bad wave starts again.
What I am doing wrong? What I can do better for letting him sleep better? We have always responded to his cry, unless they are clearly just dreams or self chat. Now we can recognize almost instantly a cry that needs follow up and a cry that does not. I always dream of a 12h sleep baby, but at least uninterrupted 11h I would gladly accept. We blame a lot teething, and illness, but we run out of excuses many times. For example now he is in a bad wave, and yesterday he was a fantastic little boy, no illness that I can see. but he had 1 nw and an ew at 6:30.