13 month old sudden sleep issues

[KDogg]

Hi all,

Our little boy of 13 months seems to have fallen off the good-sleeper truck.

Since he was born last October, apart from the odd short episode when he's been poorly or teething, he's been a very good sleeper. We have a good routine and although we feed him to sleep (this concerns us for potential future problems) he knows when it's time to go to sleep and has generally slept through till at least 6am.

Basically since the clocks went back, he couldn't get to grips with it and was waking up at 05:30, then he would wake up at 04:30, then 04:50, then 03:00, then 05:00.

Then he got some kind of virus which gave him quite severe vomitting and diarrhoea for about a week over which we pretty much spent every night taking turns either nursing him and trying to get him back to sleep or taking him into the spare bed to get him to sleep.

Since then, although he's gone back to sleeping through the night, he's still waking up at around 5:30-6:00am, but he's slowly beginning to rebel against going to bed when we put him down.

He's taking longer to settle, and generally when we lie him down he'll wake up and start crying, or if we can get him down, he'll wake up within half an hour and start screaming histerically whereas in the past he's just cried on a bit until we've gone back up to settle him. Last night we spent two hours trying to get him to sleep and it got to the point where we had to bring him back downstairs where he sat quietly for half an hour then just as we thought he was going to nod off, he decided he wanted to play and started wriggling and trying to play with stuff, so I took him back up and tried to get him off and after another half hour of him wriggling and crying and generally being naughty, I just put him down and left him to cry in his cot.

Within 10mins he was fast asleep.

He may be teething again, but we've tried giving him Nurofen or Calpol, neither of which seem to make any difference.

Any ideas?

I should point out that he's also very reluctant to nap during the day although will albeit for short periods. He is also clearly very tired by early evening so it's not that he is not tired.

There's a developmental leap around 13 months which messes with sleep. My DS has just come out of it - in his case he'd take ages to settle and would babble away for ages at night. I guess his brain was working overtime.

I maintained the bedtime routine, did a bit of cuddling to get him to sleep, made sure he napped properly (he has two a day) and it got better after a couple of weeks.

Although now he's ill (again!) so not holding out hope that it'll last!

Our DS is almost 16 months now and we seem to be just coming out of this whixh kicked in at almost excalty 13 months. It coincides with a lot of developmental stuff like walking which apparently sends their little brains into overdrive + its often the time after 1 year that mums go back to work (this was true in our case) so that plus teething and colds combined for a real run of interrupted nights after really about 9 months of perfect sleep. All I can suggest is try not to give in to bringing him downstairs which is the daytime awake place. Keep him upstairs in the dark no matter what. We used calpol where needed and milk as necessary to get him back down and occasionally resorted to co sleeping but I HATE doing that and always carried him back to his cot once he was properly asleep. We then had a week or so where there was nothing wrong but I think he'd got used to the attention but a couple of nights of controlled crying seems to have sorted that out (very hard to do at 3am though- might be worth warning your neighbours!) We seems to be getting back to normal 7pm - 6,30am ish now but I am touching wood here as who knows? Maybe also look at hs naps. Is he still on two or one a day? DS only has one now, usually late morning and for 1-2 hrs. best of luck, I do think it is a phase (I posted on here a week or so ago about the same thing but it HAS just started to improve - there is hope)!

No advice I'm afraid, but this thread makes me feel better as we're going through exactly the same thing now. It's really bloody hard as we've been used to getting lots of sleep, plus I've just gone back to work so find lack of sleep even harder to cope.

I didn't know about the 13 month development stint though it does make real sense. We've had loads of upheaval recently (starting nursery, lots of illnesses, teething, spending time at MIL's house overnight due to family issues) so I'm not surprised DS has been completely off kilter.

So I'll be watching this with interest to get some tips. DS is ill again at the moment so can't really do anything other than deal with it but once he's well I definitely need to tackle this head on!