DS is 2.3. Co-slept since birth and general relaxed attitude, breastfed to sleep (still is) no routine etc for first year or so. He went through periods where he would go to bed at 8pm-ish and I'd leave him in our bed and go up when we went to bed, but it never lasted more than a couple of months at a time. He never went to sleep later than 11pm though as that was when XP used to come to bed and he would always without fail lie down and sleep then.
Then I split up from XP when DS was 14 months old. Decided to keep co-sleeping to help him feel secure with the move, split etc. However his sleep went really mad as he kept waiting for XP to come to bed. It was nuts, I was pushing him around the streets at 2, 3am in his buggy just to get him to sleep. After a few weeks of this I decided to follow advice I was getting from everyone and set a really strict routine in the daytime, in the hope it would help his night time sleep, and it did - I was surprised as I'd always hated the idea of a routine, but it really helped. His sleep improved and everything was great - for 2 or 3 months or so.
Since then it seems to go on a cycle. Everything's fine for a couple of months, then it gets messed up for a couple of months, then he slips into it again and it's fine. When he won't sleep or he wakes up after a few hours wide awake, I do let him come downstairs, only because I can't think of anything else to do. I don't want to leave him to cry because I don't think he's going to sleep anyway if he isn't tired. I can't stay in the room with him because I get so wound up that I just end up crying and shouting and screaming at him. So I let him come down, but I don't play with him or give him any attention, and I try and make it boring.
But it doesn't seem to matter whether I do the routine or not. Some days I get it perfect and he goes into it perfectly and it all works great, but other days I still get it perfect and he still manages to miss his nap, so he either naps too late and is sleepy and difficult to wake, or doesn't nap at all and is too tired to eat his dinner, which means he wakes up 4 hours or so after he's gone to bed, both hungry and wide awake! Or he will nap and eat fine, but isn't tired by bedtime so he will feed for an hour or so and then pop up recharged by his power nap and keep going for another 2-3 hours, which means I have to wake him up in the morning and puts him out for the whole day.
I'm just so fed up with playing catch up with him all the time. I thought once he was in a routine, he would stay in one. I didn't think he'd fight it all the time. I feel resentful that I devote all this time to keeping him in routine and he still manages to mess it up. I wonder if I messed it all up by not insisting on a routine when he was younger.