Wife exhausted - live wire 1 yr old won't sleep

[Tireddaddy23]

1 year old sleep issues/mum is exhausted

Posting as a worried dad! My wife is at her whits end with our 1 year old (just turned), she is an absolute live wire from the start to the end of the day, she's already walking around almost running! She never...and I mean never stops! Which is great fun admittedly

However the worst part is that she just won't sleep great at night, last night she was up 5 times! Tonight we've only just got her down after two false starts and it's taken an hour and a half to settle her (she woke from her last nap at 4pm!)
Every night she is up at least twice or three times a night and has only ever slept through twice!

Naps are usually ok she still having two of them and are anywhere from 1 hour to 2 hours AVG about 1.5 hours x 2

My wife goes back to work in two weeks (baby starts nursery) and feels almost depressed by the worry, partly because she just isn't getting enough rest, she's absolutely exhausted and when she starts back as a solicitor she has a stressful amount of work to get through!

We've tried everything...
Night feeds, ignoring her, Calpol, gum teething stuff, early bed time, later bed time, more layers, less layers, heating uo a bit more, night light, setting the wind down tone early, read books, bath time and she feeds fine with solids (but has started chucking a lot more food on the floor ATM)! I'm not sure what else we can do but it's so hard for this to keep going!

It doesn't help that we've got a Bengal cat that doesn't shut up either lol

Please help 🥺

Dad taking on half of the night wakings would reduce mum's tiredness by half immediately, have you tried that perhaps?

My biggest bugbear was that my (hint, now ex) dh never got up in the night. Ever. Doing so would have helped my stress and possibly saved our marriage.

You'd be REALLY surprised OP about how much she (your wife) can manage with some shared responsibility. Everything else is trial and error (but you deffo need cut the naps and wake by 3pm at the latest)

Some babies/toddlers/children are just like that tbh. Whilst her sleep isn't great, it's fairly normal for her age. If the norm for her is 2-3 wake ups, I imagine that's not far off normal.

I'm assuming that you're either sharing the nights * or alternating them already. If not, then please start, and maybe do more than your 50% for a while to make up for not doing this.

*By alternating I don't mean you doing until midnight so you still get most of an evening, and a full night sleep, whilst your wife forces herself to bed at 8pm and then had an awful night. I mean changing at 3am, or varying the 'shifts' you take.

This, it is ridiculous you are posting about your wife being tired whilst you sleep in another room. There is a very obvious answer.

I don't sleep in another room anymore and do actually share some of the load with my wife, but she wanted me to get some sleep as I'm working full time and up early and she was as she still is breast feeding through the night but it's obvious you both needed to get that off your chest.

She is only breastfeeding now as a comfort thing in the night to help her settle.

We are going through something similar with our 14 month and I went back to work last month. We've just dropped the first nap and it seems to have massively helped. She took a week or so to get used to no morning nap and it's still taking a bit of distraction to get her through the morning but is working. She is our third so we were prepared for this stage this time. Just remember that it will pass, I promise!

Oh and we have to wake her by 2.30 at the latest

It deals with the results of the night wakes, rather than the causes, but I used to feed DS to sleep at 8pm, and then go to bed.
DH used to do everything he could to settle baby until he came to bed at 12/1. Those 4 or 5 straight hours were what got me through.

DS stopped requiring parental input overnight around 4 years old. He's a decade older than that now, and I still hear him awake at night if I can't sleep!

Can you sleep / are you exhausted OP?

It's a tough age in many ways. Would expressed milk in a bottle provide the same level of comfort (it does for some babies)? If you think she really still needs two naps, I'd think of the day in segments:
Up, breakfast etc, tire her out at home.
Nap
Tire her out outside the home.
Short nap, finished by 2.30pm
Fresh air, as much of it as you can (admittedly difficult at this time of year). A Wendy House for the garden, good wellingtons and a raincoat can be a game changer. A very consistent routine for winding down and bedtime, as others have said.
The final segment is the toughest, especially with long, dark evenings and rotten weather. It's easier to tire them out between 11 and 3 with playground, parks etc, but you don't want her to waste hard earned tiredness on nap #2.

My DD was like this, her sleep improved when I stopped breast feeding completely, although we had a month of hellish nights. Also my DD has always just had low sleep needs. A 1 year old needs between 11 and 14 hours sleep. My DD would only ever sleep the minimum amount and still does at age 3, only 9 hours now with no naps.

Sharing ‘some of the load’ doesn’t sound like 50:50. If she’s a solicitor then she’s got a demanding job to crack on with and will need sleep too. If your baby is 1 it doesn’t need to breast feed throughout the night and can be given water or formula if truly hungry so she can rest. Be prepared for what a rude awakening it can be for the non primary carer when mum goes back to work as you’ve been used to getting a lot of sleep and then suddenly boom, the expectation is that you both have to work and so you can’t get away with mum doing the bulk of all the night stuff (without huge resentment). At 1 baby should have a short 15-30 min morning nap and then a long lunch nap with no nap later in the afternoon (avoid car or pram late avo for a bit). The idea is the morning nap drops next by about 14-15 months and consolidates all into one big nap at lunch time. This tends to be what nurseries do. If baby is waking up this much for feeds it sounds like a habit that needs to be weaned off from. I had a child who did the same. Mum had to gradually taper the feeds by cutting short, and then just not offering up the breast and only water.

Is she getting outside in the morning to run around? Fresh air and sun on her face (however weak this time of year) could help

It is generally much easier for the non breastfeeding parent to settle the baby if you decide to wean or even night wean. No wonder she is exhausted if still feeding at night.

Thank you all for the lovely advice we are trying the capped nap today and settling her in now but she is being very cranky, maybe as she is just so tired 🤞🏻

We have the lady from the nursery coming round next week so we can ask about naps there and hopefully once she starts she will burn off loads of energy!

TBF she was only up once last night so it really is hit and miss 🙈

Yeah we try and get her out most days but the weather has been so bad this past two weeks it's been difficult. Now she is walking and it gets drier I think weay let her have a run around outside too which will be lovely 😍

My baby is also just turned 1. I am still feeding her through the night too. Some nights she can be up 5/6 times then other nights just 2.
My DP can’t help as baby won’t take a bottle and boob gets her back to sleep quickly. On the bad nights though my DP goes and gets in the spare bed and DD comes in with me so I can doze through the night wakes. He then gets up with her in the morning for an hour or so so I can have a bit longer. It’s tough but I’m telling myself it won’t last forever!

i would

• drop to one nap
• drop the feeding after bedtime
• outdoors once a day minimum, ideally twice.

on the naps…
to do this I started giving lunch at 11 lam then slowly pushing back by 10mins per week.

its worth trying for a week to see.

on the bedtime…

we bottle fed from 4m… our DD was sleeping like a dream but got ill for couple of weeks and kept waking. As she was cantankerous and we were desperate we started giving her some milk at 3am…
big mistake. huge!! 😅
she started automatically waking at 3am to feed.
it took a month / 6 weeks to get her back on track 🙈

You guys need to stop the night feeds so you do the night wakings for one week straight so baby gets used to it.

If your wife doesn’t want to / isn’t ready to give up night feeds that’s absolutely her choice but her baby will keep waking for feeds…

outdoors
my DD would walk close to a mile by 14m it was shocking. If we couldn’t get outdoors and she didn’t have a run around it was carnage. I spend a lot of time in winter at indoor shopping malls!!!!

I have two toddlers. One sleeps ok the other is awful. It’s a complete myth they should be sleeping through by one and actually an awful lot of kids don’t sleep through reliably till school.
we tried everything also. DH a doctor and me working in finance.

i ended up leaving work it just was not manageable at all. Youngest DD is now 2.5 and still up 2-3 times a night although admittedly this is much better than it used to be.

Stop focusing on how to get her to sleep through the night, obviously she’s just not a sleeper, and start focusing on how to survive until she does sleep.

DH and I ended up in separate rooms with me getting up on nights he was working and then on his off days he does nights in exchange for lie ins (DD also wakes at 5am every day!)

Our eldest (3.5) generally sleeps 7:30-6 undisturbed. Gutted at what our life could have been

Really need to ditch the nighttime breastfeeds. To help with sleep overall, to enable sharing night wakings 50/50, and to help your wife be less tired as making milk does add extra tiredness. Agree that you doing all night wakings for a while will help with this - as will not BF to sleep any other time (ie naptime).

At that age I gave a stodgy supper like weetabix or porridge. Something milky and filling but not exciting. Really helped with night wakings - I think once they start running around they get hungry!

Yep, agree drop the night feeds completely.
a supper of porridge or something at bedtime may help, and a formula feed.
last nap to end by 2.00pm is good advice, and maybe try a dummy at night?
a warm beanie teddy thingie might be comforting.

Definitely drop to 1 nap. She’s having too much daytime sleep

Ok, new plan if baby is breastfed, and presuming that she won't take a bottle...

My second was bf, refused bottles, became hysterical if my husband dealt with her at night, and made your daughter look like a fab sleeper. She was up between 5-15 times a night from 6-18m.

My husband

• took on the majority of the cooking, chores etc. Not 50%, most of it
• took on most of the care of our (non sleeping) older child, all of her wakes etc.
• took youngest when she woke (around 6), got both kids up and out to childcare so I could get 2-3 hours before working (wfh thankfully)
• made sure I could nap with baby wherever, when not working
• taking them out at weekends so I could catch up

It didn't make up for the awful sleep. But it helped, and with a bottle refusing unsettled child he did all her could. He didn't take on 'some' of the load, he took on as much as he could without lactating.

Drop the breast feed. Do alternate nights with your wife. Raising a child is the equivalent tk a full time job so there no competitive shit about needing sleep for work.

She's returning to work so you have to split it. Fairly. Night on night off. Earplugs on the night off and crack on.

DS1 was a shit sleeper and started doing split nights the day I went back to work. DH and Inhad always shared the nights as best we could but this was another level. He (DS) would sleep 7-10 ish then wake and be awake for four hours ish. Nothing we would do would help. We tried everything. Eventually he would go back down about 3am and we had to be up at 6am for work. It nearly broke us.

Also I think you need to move to one nap and no more napping after 3pm