Over the past couple of weeks my 20 month old is taking longer and longer to settle to sleep at night. Unless he falls asleep when having his bottle, which happens maybe 2 nights out of 7, he can take up to 1h 15 m to settle to sleep. DH and I are finding this draining and frustrating. We get so little of our evening to us and are rarely eating dinner before 830 and have no time to do anything between DS going off to sleep and us needing to eat. He's also started waking up around 45m - 1h earlier than he had been. He went to sleep at gone 8 last night after going up for his bath at 7... He woke at 545 this morning and these days, when he wakes, that's it. No chance of bringing him into our bed for a cuddle and a snooze. He wants to be up, will scream and call to us if we don't get him out of his cot more or less straight away and won't keep still after that.
His bedtime routine is bath (most days) or a wash, dress, brush teeth, story then bottle of milk drank while sat on our lap in the rocking chair in his room. If he's still awake after his bottle we rock him a bit but if he's not asleep in a few minutes we know it's going to be a long one. We have a white noise machine which no longer seems to soothe him. If we put him in his cot awake he cries immediately, even if we're still in the room.. Patting him doesn't calm him. He gets up, tries to get out of his grobag, thrashes around in his cot, calls out to be picked up etc. And if we leave the room when he's awake (we rarely do) it's 10 times worse. Unless he gets picked up and rocked to sleep he just won't go off. In addition to the time it takes, he's now very heavy :( Once picked up he stops crying and will them be singing, laughing or saying random words while rubbing his eyes and yawning.
Daytime naps are fine. He settles to sleep relatively quickly and easily with just a couple of minutes of cuddling or a quiet story being read to him in the same chair in the same room. And he sleeps for at least an hour, often two, in a not fully dark room.
He's v energetic / active and so we try to give him enough physical activity every day to allow him to burn off his energy and some days I really can't believe how long he takes to sleep because he must be / clearly is (rubbing eyes) tired.
Teething and illness aside (he has had repeated colds / chest infections for what feels like forever and his night time coughing is disruptive for him and us), for the past few months his sleep has been pretty good.
We've been very gentle and responsive with him to this point. I don't favour CIO and don't want to go down that route even now but I'm really running out of patience,
His room has a blackout blind and blackout lined curtains.
As well as just being frustrating of itself, we've visited / had visit friends with little ones of a similar age enough times to know that most his age are much better at bedtime. They settle to sleep themselves. Why can't mine??
Help! I don't know what to do differently. What's worth trying? Earlier bedtime? Later bedtime? Anything else? TIA