2.5 year old waking at least once every night - HELP!

[mmddds]

My daughter is 2.5 years old and has been waking at least once each night for a couple of months now (she has always been a great sleeper until now).  It started with a bad cold and seems to have stuck!  We've gotten it down to just once a night, but my husband and I are at our wit's end with baby #2 on the way.  She is in a toddler bed now and simply gets up and comes into our room wanting to "snuggle".  One of us will walk her back to her room and "tuck her in" and she usually will fall back asleep with no trouble.  How can we keep her in her room?  I worry that she's having bad dreams (when she has slept on our bed, she tosses and turns, cries out at times, and wakes up several times dreaming).  I hate to ignore her if she needs our support, but we're TIRED!!!  What do we do?

[jchang]

This happened for about 2-3 months when we transitioned from crib to toddler bed - she'd get out of bed & come to our room several times a night.  Needless to say, we were exhausted.  After trying several methods, what worked for her was to put her back in bed without speaking to her.  The key to our success was to not look into her eyes and do not talk or interact with her AT ALL (i.e. no hugs, no kisses).  I caught a snippet of "Supernanny" on Monday & she was talking about this method as well.  The other thing we did was that whoever put her in bed at the beginning of the night would follow through with all the night wakings so that it would be consistently the same parent - I'm not sure why that's important but I read it in one of my books.  HTH.