18 mo suddenly waking at night and being very clingy

[Latium123]

My 18 mo DD has generally been a good sleeper. We have a good routine for her. She was BF until 15 mo and she used to fall asleep on the boob but we were able to adapt and move on from that after we finished feeding. For the last few months we have worked on putting her down awake and she seemed to take to it no problem, we even got to the point we were able to put her down and leave the room while she chatted to herself / downloaded all the day's information and drifted off to sleep. She was sleeping through, around 11-12 hours. She still has one nap per day usually for between an hour - two hours just after lunch. In the last couple of weeks she has started waking 2-3 times a night, wanting cuddles, only wants to sleep on me or DH, wants rocked to sleep after she wakes up and every time we try to lay her down she wakes up and cries loudly. I am 8mo PG so am pretty exhausted just now anyway and DH is doing his bit but we are struggling to know what to do now and a bit worried about dealing with this once the new baby arrives if we don't address it now. We have always tried to use gentle parenting techniques, not keen on CIO. We have found in the past that we have responded to her needs and things just settle down or move on but this seems to be a problem. Any ideas / suggestions?? Thanks

[MunchCrunch01]

Could she be teething? My DD 2 is the same age and we've had a couple of bad weeks due to the large canines, she acts like this when she's a bit under the weather. What about a music association - with DD1, when she woke up we'd kick off her music tunes and she'd settle back down listening to it. I'd be inclined to think about shortening the nap if things don't get better and seeing if that helps the night sleep at all.

[Latium123]

Thanks Munch. It could be teeth, and maybe the bigger teeth do hurt more. We also wondered about shortening the nap, so I think that is also worth a try. Good suggestion with the music, we use music for her falling asleep in the first place but we haven't tried that when she wakes in the night and the association may just work.