2.5 year old waking for hours in the early hours, yelling…

[AngryBirdsNoMore]

I’m off Mumsnet for Lent but I’m getting desperate so I’m back.

DS1 is 2.5 years old. Since about 6 months he’s been an excellent sleeper with a few blips that have usually followed illness / hospital stays (asthmatic).

For the last few weeks he’s been waking every morning around 2am and is awake for 2-3 hours. Sometimes he plays quietly in bed, but sometimes - like this morning - he howls and yells and screams for us. Between this and a 6 month old with a cold, no one is getting a great nights sleep. Everyone is knackered the next day.

How do I get through this? How do you re-teach a toddler to sleep through the night?

He doesn’t really seem to want anything except attention which is the one thing I’m absolutely not giving him at 4am.

Sorry no advice but solidarity 💐 for the last 2 months I've been up every single day at 6am with my 2.5 yo. It's prime imagination development time - at this age my sister's two just stopped sleeping and haven't started again 🫣

Think this is just my life now!

Is he fully awake when he is yelling for you? My DS had night terrors which we couldn't wake him from so just wondering if it is yelling for attention or yelling as part of his dream/nightmare. Unfortunately no real advice either way - just had to wait for him to grow out of the night terrors. He was a terrible sleeper in general as well! Was knackered for years but it did pass eventually.

What’s his daytime routine? Is he still napping in the day? What does bedtime look like?

His daytime routine is one nap (1-2 hours - usually 1.5hrs) at lunchtime, whether he’s at nursery or home. He’s up at about 7 for the day and goes down at about 7, and stays asleep very reliably until the yelling at 2ish.

Without a nap he can’t get to the end of the day in one piece. So I don’t think we’re at nap dropping stage. When he’s refused to nap at nursery he’s just in bits by 5pm.

Bedtime routine has been the same since he was very small - bath, milk, 2-3 books on the sofa with me and DH and DS2, carried to bed and tucked in. He gets to sleep just fine.

Cut the nap and bring bedtime to 6.

DS2 has recently moved into the same bedroom as him (we’re in a two bed, it’s a necessity that they’re together) so that’s probably caused the disturbed sleeping. Or just general 2.5 year old imagination / development / etc.

So I can understand why it’s happened, I now need to know how to get over it because we’re all going mad. Poor DH works full time…

@Liveanlearn yep wide awake