DD2 is 17mths.She has never been a good sleeper (nor was older DD- I hoped we may have more luck in that dept 2nd time around but sadly not! 😭) She has for alot of her life been awake for the majority of the evening and is often not settled to sleep til 9pm-ish.
We've tried cutting her naps down to try and make the bedtimes earlier, but if she goes to sleep too early at night she does this thing where she has about 20-30mins then wakes up and will not settle back to sleep til several hours later! And it also means she is up alot in the night from about 3/4am onwards because she isn't that tired by then to settle back well.
She never sleeps great at night anyway....even on a good night she is usually up 2-3 times wanting me to feed her or sometimes DH can rock and sing to her.Her going to bed later used to guarantee her not waking too early either, but now she is up early at about 6am aswell, 7 at best, so burning the candle at both ends.This is tricky when she goes to her childminder because they go out in the mornings, so she can't then nap til after lunch and probably gets overtired.
The other issue is that when toddler is downstairs all evening with us, older DD keeps coming down saying she is feeling left out, which is understandable, but she can't stay downstairs all night as she needs to get to bed at a decent time for school (although she is rarely asleep long before 9 either!) And we can't sit upstairs all night either, otherwise we literally get no time to ourselves or each other, and half the time us being upstairs with DD keeps her awake anyway.
So at our wits end with it all...it feels like everyone else's children of this sort of age are in bed asleep by 7/8pm ....any ideas of what we can do to improve things....or do we just have unusually bad sleepers! 😖