I'm at my wits end, I'm in tears here!
My 3 and a half year old boy cannot stay awake during the day! Not at home, not at school, nada!
He sleeps from 8am to 8pm, but from 2pm in the afternoon onwards I have to go to extraordinary relentless lengths to keep him awake. My boy is one of those kids who - if he sleeps for even 10 minutes in the day all bets are off. No bedtime until the wee small hours, he's up all night messing around, won't settle, keeps getting out of bed, shouts and screams to come back down. Even if that 10 minute sleep occurs at 11am, you would think it's early enough in the day that he'd still sleep that night right? Nope.
Basically I can't cope with this anymore. All day, every single day - all I do is try to keep him awake. Chocolate milk, trips to the park, tickle games, incentives to stay up, nothing works. The only thing that does work is a bath, he can't physically fall asleep in the water and it rejuvenates him, but he can't sit in a bath from 2pm til bedtime. Once that tactic has been used, that's it, there's no more "stay awake" weapons in my arsenal! And it's all on me, hubby goes to work at 1pm and doesn't come back til 9pm. I think it quite suits him though because he can't deal with doing all this either at the weekends!
It sounds so stupid to be so frustrated about it but I'm sick and tired. I hate staying up all night with him because he slept a minute or 2 in the daytime and I can't deal with spending the whole day keeping him up anymore, especially when he persistently bawls to go to sleep the whole day long. I loathe this, I can't stress it enough. It's the bane of my life. Scratch that actually, because I have no life, because this is all I do with it! I'm fed up. I'd love to do ANYTHING else in my day!
It can't be normal? No other child in his class has this issue. His older brother never had this at 3 years old. His 2 year old cousin doesn't sleep in the day anymore and doesn't try to. And please don't come at me with "you shouldn't compare kids," we all do it when we think something is different with our kids!
I've debated taking him to a doctor in all seriousness but wouldn't know what to say! "My child won't stay awake during the day!" I'm fairly certain we'll be shown the door!
The internet is useless. Tonnes of advice on how to get them to sleep but literally zero on kids who can't stay awake or how to get them to stay awake. No books, tips, advice, similar stories, nothing.
Anyone had anything similar, any tips or tricks on how to keep him up? Tablets or TV makes him worse, he gets even dozier in front of them. I'll take anything, even if it's only 1 person who has nothing more to say than "this was me too!" because I'm at the end of my patience now.
Thanks for reading. XxXx