briefly, how many nights of controlled crying/PUPD/water instead of milk, did you need before your child got the hint that they should stay in their own bed and sleep all night?
lengthily, DS (18 months) has been getting increasingly awful with sleep in the past 2 months - he goes down in his cot at the beginning of the night (it's at the end of our bed, no room for him to move into his own room for the next few months, but we should be buying a house soon where he'll have his own room), then wakes up some time between 11 and 1 (we go to bed at 9.30 or 10, and he NEVER rouses then, occasionally before we go up, but never when we actually enter the room).
He will immediately stand up and SCREAM at the top of his lungs until we respond (there's no escalation). If the response is not a feed and a cuddle, he screams more, so for a while, we took him into our bed, and I'd feed him, then he'd wriggle and twitch and scratch and poke, and hair pull, and generally be an absolute nightmare bed-companion until about 5 am when he'd sleep properly, starfished across the bed. DH and I get up for work at 6 am, so we have been slowly but surely getting more and more wretched over the past 2 months.
So, last week, I snapped, and decided to night wean, and get him to stay in his cot over night. When he wakes, he gets a cup of water, then he is laid back down and left to it for 5 mins, then we lay him back down again, etc etc. Effectively controlled crying. He goes back down beautifully the first time he wake, but the second time - it took him 3 hours of screaming the 1st night, 2.5 hours the second, then 3 hours every night since. DH and I are broken. We are not sure how long we can keep this up for without maiming him or me crashing on the motorway on the way to work. Sicne the scremaing is normally between 3 am and when he conks out, we haven't slept all week.
We are also using CC at bed times, although occasionally he falls sleep mid feed. Last night he took 45 minutes to go down, which was brilliant, it's a massive improvement on previous 4 hour yelling sessions. We stay in the room btw, if we leave the room he vomits and climbs out the cot, bashing his head on the way out. It isn't pretty.
He has a dummy, but he tends to chuck it the first time we walk away from the cot, and then he points and shouts for his dudu in between screams. Oh, and he goes to bed at 6.30/7 every night, and we forgo the bath if he's knackered. Otherwise, same routine, day in, day out. his naps are all over the place, but he needs one in the morning and one after lunch - some days he'll refuse his nap altogether, and there's nowt we can do about it.
I'm just unsure how long we should wait before giving up on this strategy.