My daughter is almost 2 1/2. She has always been an excellent napper, but has also always been very hit or miss on her nighttime sleeping. I cannot figure out any rhyme and reason to the nights she does happen to sleep most of the night and the ones that doesn't. She wakes up during the night whether she had a nap or not so I don't feel that shortening or eliminating her nap (usually about 1.5 - 2 hrs) is going to make a difference.
She slept in our room (in her own bed) for her first few months. She did a dream feeding for about 6 or 7 months, but started sleeping on her belly when she was about 3 or 4 months so she was always wide awake for the dream feed after that. As she got older, I would nurse her back to sleep when she woke at night because I knew it would put her back to sleep. When left to CIO, she would be awake for hours. We still would let her CIO, but it would be literally HOURS. Not always crying the whole time, but definitely awake the whole time. I'm pretty sure that I stopped nighttime nursing when she about 18 months, but I'm not entirely certain. She stopped nursing completely at 21 months, but by then she was only nursing before bed.
Once the nighttime nursing session was eliminated, I tried to stop going in to see her when she woke. I tried to let her put herself back to sleep. (She sucks her fingers.) She rarely cries when she's up, but will stay awake for hours talking and laughing. She moved from a crib to a bed right after she turned 2 and that seemed to help for a little while, but she eventually went back to waking up and talking. For awhile, I would sometimes go in and change her diaper and that would sometimes help her go back to sleep. But I eventually stopped doing that a few months ago.
Now, we have our 3rd child coming in April and she has been moved into the same bedroom as her 5 1/2 year old brother. For the past few days, she will still have not fallen asleep for hours after we leave her. (We put him to bed first and he is always asleep within 15 minutes, max.) She will wake up in the middle of the night and start talking and laughing and eventually to try to crawl into bed with her brother. At first, we told her that room is for Big Kids and she had to sleep like a Big Girl. We would give her a warning after the first time she woke up and then move her out of the room and onto a cot (portable camping bed, not a crib) in the nursery if she was talking again. But now we think she likes the cot and doesn't want to sleep in the same room as her brother. She likes being in the room with him, but wants to play with him, not to sleep. There is a night light in his room, but not in hers. Part of me feels like this could be contributing to the problem, but removing the night light is not an option as our son is terrified of the dark and will not sleep without it. (He will start screaming and crying in the middle of the night if he wakes up and it's not on.)
My son has always been a great sleeper and he will sleep through her talking at the beginning of the night, but if he gets woken up after about 4am, he won't go back to sleep so he's just up for the day at that point.
What ideas do you have for what we can do to help eliminate these nighttime wakings and/or make it more desirable to stay in the big kid room? I'm thinking of taking the cot out of the nursery and putting a crib in there instead so that she will have to sleep in that if she is taken out of her bed. (The hope being that she won't want to sleep in the crib so she will behave better so she can stay in her bed.) But the problem there is that she DOES have to sleep in a crib when she spends the night at her grandparents' houses so I'm concerned that if I tell her cribs are for babies that she won't want to sleep in them anymore when she's not at home.
We also started her on potty training only a couple of days after this room switch, but she has been doing really well with that so I'm reluctant to believe that it's too many changes. I feel like she would have also rebelled against potty training if that was the case.
I have a huge pile of sleep training books from the library to scour so any input is appreciated!!
