26mo never slept through, dropped nap & loads of NWs

[KatyBee]

My daughter has some digestive health issues, so has always woken a lot at night. She has never slept longer than 4 hours at a time and usually wakes every 1-3 hours crying for me. We bedshare and she is still breastfed (to sleep most nights, tho she can fall asleep without it and also some NW) and she’s my 2nd baby with sleep issues, so I know from experience these props are likely to be contributing to her poor sleep patterns, however i’m not necessarily seeking help with those here..

However a few weeks ago she stopped napping most days and this has made her NWs much worse. We get the occasional nap in the car now, but if that happens bedtime becomes 9:30/10pm and she is then OT and we get NWs and EW - so not much total sleep in 24hrs.

When she doesn’t nap she obviously falls asleep easily between 6-7pm but wakes almost every hour very upset... or like last night is just awake for long stretches wanting to feed. However she will generally be in bed for at least 12hrs overall.

I know this 1-0. is a well known crappy phase sleep wise - but I wasn’t sure if there was a preference between attempting to keep the nap and overall sleep being less or facing the chronic OT with more time asleep overall? This does seem a bit early to be dropping the nap - but she isn’t falling asleep in the car (which was the point I knew my son was ready to drop it) and having her up until 10pm and then up at 5:30/6am sucks to be honest.. not sure what to do for the best?

[Haribo2012]

Hi there, sorry for the late reply.
The 1-0 as you say is crappy. If she’s having no nap I’d try bringing bedtime early if possible to try and avoid the constant waking which are prob from OT.
With both of mine if they napped for a long nap their day would get to 14/15 hours long which wasn’t for me, but if I allowed 20 min CN they seemed to go down ok at about 12/13 hour day length.
Both of mine were well into nap dropping by this age but then it can come back again, my 3 year old has decided he likes a snooze again and that playing havoc with bedtime.
It could be a developmental spurt too, is her language coming on as this always caused sleep issues for us.x

[Katet]

Have you looked into if she has fluid in her ears, that is often a cause of multiple wakings in toddlers, they may not have an ear infection as such, but the pain from the fluid when lying down can be enough to upset them. Not all GPs are good at seeing fluid build up so if say she is a mouth breather & often has a snotty nose, try & get to see an ENT to get her checked out. My DS1's night wakings were 100% caused by fluid (with no infection) in the ears.