Moved from bed back to cotbed! Have I done the right thing?

[Twirl]

Can somebody advise me please, I'm having a complete nightmare! DD (22 mths) has always been a great sleeper (12 hours straight through) so we decided to move her to a bed (she has a cotbed which we converted) as number 2 is on the way. We have just had 10 nights of sheer hell. She will no longer go to bed or stay there, is still awake and crying at 11pm, wakes at least twice/three times in the night and will only go to sleep if we stay there with her. As soon as she realises we have gone she wakes up and then the whole cycle starts again. Controlled crying, which used to work when she was in her cot, no longer works. In desperation we have converted the bed back to her cotbed and last night she slept soundly all night. Have I done the right thing? and how do I go about trying to move her in the future?

oh dear Twirl We changed dd's cotbed into a cot a couple of months ago, she too had always been a fantastic sleeper since cc at 6 months, and then she began testing my limits again once in a bed.
She wasn't upset or unable to get to sleep on her own, though - she would just leave the room and run down the hall and find it all very funny. Rapid return for an hour and a half just did me in and she found very funny, and i just wasn't willing to do it for the necessary amount of days, so I resorted to tying a rope on the door handle so she couldn't get out (but could still see out). Sounds cruel, I know, and she would of course start crying then because she realised she'd lost the battle, but I was confident that it wasn't cruel as such because she knows was bedtime is for and was just testing my limits. (Besides, the first time i did it she spent half an hour trying every single type of cry imaginable, it was unbelievably manipulative, literally one second a loud genuine sounding upset cry, next second a nice polite "Mummy?" So I didn't feel too bad! And it worked - although I feel a bit that I have to warn her when i say night-night that the rope will go on the door if she gets up, otherwise she'll try her luck!
She does on the odd occasion appear in the middle of the night but goes back to bed without any fuss. (she is, btw, 2.6 now, slightly older than your dd.)

So, is she genuinely very upset about going to bed or just messing about like my dd? If just messing about I think you just have to be ultra firm and do whatever you need to so she knows absolutely that she is to stay in bed. If she is genuinely freaked out about the bed (I've read some children are) i'm sorry i have no other advice!

Poor Twirl!

I sympathise - been there and done that - and the good news is - I now have it sorted.

We moved our son (2 1/2) into a big bed at Xmas as we wanted him settled before no 2 arrives at the end of March. It was hell! From being agood sleeper we ended up with achild who woke up 3 or 4 times a night and wanted to come in with us, or be cuddled back to sleep.

Before i tell you how I did it and what we tried, he is a bit older than your bean, so maybe that made my method work better.

1. I put a nightlight in his room (didn't work)
2. I slept on the floor in his room on a blow up mattress (didn't work)
3. I took away his day time sleep (didn't work)
4. Getting desperate by now I put the travel cot up in his room and asked him if he wanted to sleep in that .....the answer was NO! SO, when he woke up in the night - I said "well, I gave you the choice, but as you are being a baby, I will put you in the baby bed now" and put him in the travel cot. Cue hysterics....Then i pretended to leave the room and left him to scream for about 20 seconds before going back in and asking him if he wanted to get back into his big bed. The answer was a tearful "yes mummy"....I then explained to him that if he wanted to stay in the big bed he would have to be quiet and go to sleep and i pretended to be very cross "mumy is cross with you" etc etc, but gave him a big hug etc before leaving. The performance was repeated 3 times on night 1, twice on the second night and then not at all. I left the travel cot up in the room for a week so that he could see it was still there. I have now taken it down and put it away and he sleeps through all night. When we have stories and cuddles at bedtime he tells me very solemly "If you wake up - you go in the baby bed mummy". I also occasionally ask him "what do you do if you wake up in the night?" and he tells me "close your eyes and go back to sleep". We also promised him that if he slept all night for a whole week we would treat him to a new toy aeroplane - used a star chart- Bribery always helps . One other thing that might have helped. We changed the way round he slept, so that when he wakes up he can see the door from where hs is and we have left a small lamp on on the landing with one of those energy saving bulbs which gives out a really low light.

Good luck - it is even harder i think if you've been lucky to have a child that sleeps through and is then disrupted!

klara

Hi
Thanks so much for your advice ladies. DD is genuinely upset about the bed, so maybe I have done the right thing in moving her back to her cot for the moment. Lol at the rope Bourneville, but hey it worked! Our scenario sounds similar to yours Klara in that the 'magic' nightlight didn't work, sleeping on the floor didn't work. I do like the idea of the travel cot threat though so I will definitely give that a go next time I feel strong enough to try and move her! Alternatively, she could just stay in her cot until she leaves home.....

Twirl, FWIW it's worth a week or two after changing to her bed I wished so much I could turn back time and wait a bit longer! The reason I did it when I did was (not only cos i knew she was old enough and ready) but also because I discovered when my sister stayed over that I wasn't waking up straight away - my sis said dd had been awake for a while before i woke up. Luckily she used to talk to herself and amuse herself before calling me so it wasn't that drastic but it freaked me out and i thought i'd better change to a bed so she could come and get me if she needed to!