some help please

[Lici's Mum]

Ugh, ladies it has been too long.... I either can't remember it being this hard or I had a great child (well, I do anyway  :wink: ).
I have had a couple of goes babysitting my niece / goddaughter and she is 13 months but not sleep trained.  :roll:
This is not going to be a regular thing so I can't start a plan because I can't impose that on the parents. (Yes, they have the BW book, yes, they have heard me say how easy easy was and following the bw methods made life easy, but hey, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make 'em drink right?)
So my only instruction was not to let her cry longer than 10 minutes which I ignored anyway because even though this child is not mine, I know her cries were not the ignoring kind....
I picked her up and calmed her but any time we even got close to that cot she started up crying again.
So now I'm really nervous about wanting another child.... I seem to have wiped out the hard times and I'm worried that I'm in for a shock if it ever happens.
But anyway, back to the advice.... If you were babysitting infrequently a child that had not been whispered to, how would you get them to sleep?
TIA

[Maddy's Mum]

Hi there,

I think it is a completely different kettle of fish when you are dealing with a child that is not yours - you never really have a true picture of what has happened with the child - for example, has there been some kind of CC or CIO up until now which has made sleep problems worse etc.. Have the parents got a routine/been consistent etc..

I guess if you go by the book, then the best way to tackle sleep training at 13 months is using the PD part of PU/PD and every time she stands up - gently lay her back down, until eventually she will just start to sit up and you know the battle is nearly won!! I also found with Mads that when we did PU/PD at 12 months(ish) that was when she was most strong willed! and the first night I lost count of the number of PDs I did when I went past 150!

Good luck and let us know how it goes!

Dee
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