One year old won't sleep at night

[helloandthankyou]

Hello all,

I have now had over 300 nights of broken sleep and I am starting to feel the effects. I have recently gone onto anti depressants to cope with how I am feeling from so little sleep and would love to find out what I am doing wrong.

We have a bedtime routine of dinner time, bath time, story time and bottle / bed time at around 8pm. My one year old goes down absolutely fine and if he doesn't I will let him play for 10-15 minutes longer but then it's into bed. The problem is that he will not sleep through. He is up any time between midnight and 4am crying. I have tried CIO but sometimes he will self settle and sometimes he will become hysterical.

The times that I go and get him, I bring him into bed and nurse him and we stay there until it's time to start the day. Is this the problem? Should I try to get him back to sleep some other way?

Thank you in advance

Broken sleep is absolute torture so you have my sympathies.
I would suggest going to him in the night but dont bring him into your bed. Soothe him with a feed but place him back in his bed- if thats still not working, when he wakes offer him water only.

That sounds really tough. What's his nap schedule like? I'm guessing he's nearer to one than two? Have you tried different bedtimes? Have you got a partner to help share the load a bit? Sorry for all the questions.

While not as rough as you're going through but my DS had the most horrendous sleep from 7 -16 months and I ended up sleeping on his floor with an arm through the bars of his cot to stop bringing him into bed.

His naps are very sporadic. Sometimes he has one, sometimes not.. sometimes they are 30 minutes and sometimes they are 3 hours...I just don't know what I am doing wrong. I suppose it's because I never established a routine and just went with the flow and now that seems to have backfired!

My partner works away 12-14 hour shifts 7 days a week so I am parenting alone!!

x

I do Mon - Fri by myself and that's tough enough. You're doing a great job, don't be too rough on yourself.

I've always found DS sleeps best if he has good naps so that would be the thing is try to sort if I was you. It was annoying for me to start as we were limited to going out at certain times but now DS has a two hour nap at roughly the same time every day and it's great - I get a bit of downtime and can crack on with housework while he's asleep and I can nap sometimes too