BRAIN. MELTING... waking to play is making me evil

[buttoneye]

My 18mo has developed the delightful habit of waking at about 2am and not going back to sleep til 5am. Not every night but maybe 2 nights a week- enough. This is making me Very Grumpy. He is fine if i stay in bed with him (have moved from co-sleeping to him having a separate bed in my room) and let him generally rag around, though sometimes he does just cry , in a whingey-not-serious way for four hours. Sometimes b-fing will get back to sleep but often not. If i leave the room/bed he will scream blue murder indefinitely, and i've never been a very cry-it-out kind of mum (i do let him cry a bit, but not blue in the face real distress, which is what i get here) We have a good bedtime routine, he naps about 1.5hrs at lunchtime. tried night-weaning but made no difference so now i do b-f if i feel it might help- after i've tried getting him back down without. He tends to stir about 12 and then wake at 3 or 4 anyway, but the 2-5am (at least, sometimes its more like 5hours) thing is making me into an evil zombie.

Any clever ideas please?

This stage is a killer. I had it with my DD a bit younger though.
I would take DD downstairs and offer her a range of quiet toys to play quietly with but would not interact with her much. I'd lay on the sofa and relax but not sleep. I would try cutting out the feed at night though - if you're still bf, it does make more of an incentive to wake. Have you a partner who could get up a few times instead? That might help to break the cycle of feeding to sleep which he really doesn't need at this age.

Thanks Beamur,
D'you think getting him out of bed would be better? I haven't tried that yet. I have a feeling that he would think 'wicked, finally she's got the idea', and do it every night! I did cut the nightfeed but he still woke up and it just took longer to get him back down even on good nights! But i am definitely working towards night weaning, just not being too hardline about it now- sometimes its the only thing that works and he certainly doesn't get milk every night, just when i run out of other options. I don't think he's waking to feed now, i did stop night feeds completely for about two months and it made not the slightest bit of difference. Don't have a partner so its all down to me!
Good (in a way!) to know that other people get this too, not just me- when you'e on a no-sleep downer its easy to assume its because you're a Bad Mother and have clearly Made a Rod for Your Own Back etc.

I like to think of 'rod for own back' in a more 'do what you need to get by' way
I suppose I've had the philosophy that bed is for sleeping and I didn't want DD to get put off her cot by being made to stay in it when she obviously wasn't sleepy. So I found getting up and doing something else for a while helped us (still enormously tiring though). I will still do it now occasionally and she is 5. She is a good girl though and generally stays in bed without complaint, I usually only discover she is still awake when I pop up a couple of hours later to check on her! Take some comfort though in the hope that in the next few months your DS will nap less during the day and sleep longer at night.

If your only bf at night as a last resort I wouldn't take that away - it is useful when all else fails.