Morning all,
Newbie here but my wife and I are in much needed help of some advice/reassurance about about sons sleeping behaviours. For the last 6 weeks, he's only slept through (7.30/8pm to 6/7am). All other nights he's up around midnight and might go back to sleep but then might wake at 2am and not get back to sleep until 4am. I'm a rubbish sleeper so once I'm awake, I struggle to get back to sleep so I'm seriously at the end of my tether with lack of sleep. My wife is also 18 weeks pregnant.
To give some background - he's 2 years and 10 months old and until 18 months, was an amazing sleeper. He's generally well behaved the rest of the time, is smart, compassionate and a right little character. The last 6 weeks have been a challenge though.
We have the same bedtime routine - dinner between 6 and 7pm with no TV, then he has a bath, then we read him two short stories with milk before putting him down between 7.30-8pm. In the day, we try and get him down for a nap starting between 1-2pm and he can go from 40 mins to two hrs.
When we try to get him down for his nap or in the evening at bedtime, he asks us to rub his back - which unfortunately we did for a bit but we've pulled back on that. We sit in the room with him but he just uses delaying tactics leading to me telling him off. Once he's a sleep, he'll normally get to between midnight-2am and will wake and sometimes we can just get him back into bed and he'll go to sleep within 10 minutes (with my wife or I sat on the floor for comfort) and when we leave, he might sleep for another couple of hours before we have to repeat or he'll get straight up. The worst is when we do this a few times and he wakes up more and say's 'no' when we ask him to lie down.
We've tried everything - stroking his back/face to calm him, not stroking his back/face, sitting in a chair in his room, sitting on the floor, leaving him.
We've also tried closing the door/gate behind us to try and sleep train him where we go back in ever increasing time blocks to put him back in his bed but he gets so worked up and bangs the door/stair gate we have on his room and gets so worked up and he ends up saying he's scared. When we ask him what he's scared of, he says he doesn't know so we think he's playing us.
We feel like we've tried everything in the last 6 weeks and nothing seems to be working. Please can someone tell us it's going to be over soon, we'll be back to getting some sleep and maybe give us some tips for things you've done in similar situations that worked?!
Thanks in advance - apologies for the long nature of the message!