Settling 19month DTs at night

[BinkyB]

Did anyone else have a phase like this? Please tell me it is a phase!! Any tips?

My 19 month boy DTs used to just chat and sing after lights out until they fell asleep. Same in the morning, they would wake up gradually and sing/chat until I went into them sometimes half an hour later.

However for the last 3 weeks one of them is waking in the night, goes from asleep to full on wailing in the morning, and will only go to sleep if I am standing over him at night. I pat him on the back, gradually remove hand, gradually creep out of room. Several thousand times a night.

Help...! They are at such a lovely stage in the day and the best of friends, but I am starting to feel I don't have enough energy for the days as the nights have become so bad. We were up for 4 hours last night and I'm exhausted but he is scampering all over the place :)

I think you can relax a bit - it might be a stage. Had something similar recently with my 18mo twins and a friend whose singlton born on same day reported similar story at similar time.

My strategy was just to persevere through it getting them to sleep however I could (although constantly plagued by worries that I was making a rod for my own back) as I am against controlled crying. It paid off - a few weeks and suddenly one, then the other, became easier to settle at bedtime and woke up fewer times in the night.

One thing I found helped was explaining what was happening "Mummy is going back to bed now, she'll be very close and if you need her she will come back, but now it's time to go to sleep, can you say night night to Mummy? Night night" - like everything else it took some time for this message to sink in, but now I say the same things if they are a bit reluctant to go down and they say night night back and settle quickly.

The sleep deprivation is more problematic - toddler twins take up a lot of energy! Can you sleep when they do in the day? I put everything on hold for a while, just did the bare minimum and just slept whenever I could.

Hope things improve soon.