It's happened!

[Psyclist]

I know I've mentioned it before about our son waking up early morning a while back but really, over the last year we've been spoiled by how well our little lad has slept.....until now!

For the last month or so, he has suddenly started waking up several times throughout the night. We haven't seen any evidence that he has any teeth breaking out right now apart from the ever present dribble which has been there pretty much since birth.

He's 12 months now and still manages to contort himself around his cot which sometimes wakes him up and all he needs is correcting and he'll go straight off. However, a lot of the time he'll start crying and wake up, and when either of us goes through to comfort him, he'll go quiet and eventually go off to sleep and start snoring, and after a few mins when we sneak off, I am convinced that it's as soon as I step back into our bedroom, he starts crying again which as most of you know, at 3am with work looming at 6 or 7am doesn't fill me or my darling wife with parental joy.

We have tried controlled crying a couple of times but have found little to no control whatsoever and his stamina for crying can easily outrun our ability to endure it when we need to sleep. For example, one night last week we tried it, and he literally cried from 01:30 till about 05:15. Leaving both of us on the brink of calling in sick or more realistically on the brink of tearing the head off anyone who so much as smiled at either of us at work the next morning. He just would not go back to sleep/stay asleep.

Last night he decided he wanted to be wide awake at 2am and for once I didn't hear a thing because he didn't start crying but my wife could hear him gurgling on, so went in and he was stood up swinging a toy rabbit around, and when she tried to get him off to sleep again, he wasn't having any of it. The first I knew of it was when I woke and nearly lept out of bed at about 3:30am to see the pair of them stood at the foot of our bed just staring at me like some freaky film and she asked if I would look after him while she made the spare bed so she could lie down with him and try and get him off to sleep which again didn't work, but at least he was quiet which allowed one of us to get some sleep.

Top and bottom of it is the same problem every other working couple has. How the hell do we do it? Neither of us can cope with broken sleep all night, but neither of us seems able to get him to cooperate. Every now and again he'll sleep through and we'll wake up at 6:30 astonished that he hasn't made a sound, but most nights we dread the fact that we're still awake with him and we have to be up in an hour and a half.

Is there anything we can do to nip this in the bud now before it developes into something completely unmanageable?

Thanks

Kristian

[smellyfeet]

If it's the lack of sleep that is getting to you both, why dont you bring him into your bed when he wakes so you? It sounds as if he wants to be close to you guys.

DD never slept with us when she was young, but at around 10months she started sleeping in with us when she woke. It was the only way that we were going to get any sleep. The sleep training thing never worked for us.

[ComeScareWithMe]

It is the only thing that ever worked for us too.
You have a choice sometimes listen to them scream all night and feel shit all of the next day or put him in the middle of your bed and get some sleep.
He could just feel anxious without you and need a bit of extra security.

[Psyclist]

He doesn't tend to sleep too well when we've brought him in here. He generally just wriggles more and cries more but we may give it a couple of shots and see what happens.

[ComeScareWithMe]

I'm sorry :( sleep deprivation is really shit.

[BatBrainsPumpkinHead]

is he going through a growth spurt and hungry in the middle of the night. Not hugely so, just enough to make it difficult to go back to sleep. Ds went through a phase at a similar age where he needed a snack in the middle of the night to settle him. In the end it worked better if he got super just before he went to bed. Some plain so that if it is genunie (sp) hunger he'll eat but if not its not a treat iyswim.

Agree though sleep deprivation is shit.

[Igglybuff]

Can you try and prepare things the night before so spare bed etc to avoid making things too disruptive at night when your DS wakes?

Is he learning to do something new? Could he be teething? Or hungry? My DS is the same age and is teething (rivers of drool) and gets hungry at about 2am. Only a feed gets him back off. We also turn the monitor down a bit so if he gurgles, we don't get woken up.

Also it's getting cold at night now, the temp drops around 2-3am ish. Could he be cold? I've been waking up cold and it's really hard to warm up and get back to sleep. Might be worth thinking about an extra layer or have heating come on low for a few hours at about 1am.

[Psyclist]

Yeah that was a one off. That was the first time he's woken up and we've had to use the spare bed, and we had my mother up to stay last weekend hence it didn't have any sheets on.

I had considered the heating thing. I have woken up once or twice and thought it felt cold when I've got out of bed.

The problem with the midnight feed is we've tried that before and it just made things worse coz then he started waking up in the middle of the night just so he could have a bottle so we try to avoid that one, and we still feed him to sleep and I normally give him a snack about an hour before he goes to bed anyway so he should be well fed.

Ironically, although he was up a few times yesterday evening and even went quiet after crying a couple of times, he slept through after we went to bed last night so not a bad night.

He is in the middle of teething as he has 6 front teeth, but like I say he doesn't seem to have anything coming through right now although trying to get a look or a feel of his gums is a task in itself.

He's starting to take steps at the moment, so it could be something to do with that I guess if learning new tricks effects their sleep.

We'll see what he's like tonight. We've had a couple of ok nights in a row now so the problem may have passed.

[Igglybuff]

I hope you had a good night! It's going to be really cold tonight so interesting to see if your DS wakes up and you can discount that. I'd def say the walking is having an impact but once he gets going, it'll be easier to wear him out by taking him for a walk

[bippyhippy]

Have his naps changed at all? Could it be something to do with getting too much or too little sleep in the day? Or it could be a sleep regression which I read about here. Can happen at different stages apparently.