Please help. At wits end with bedtime routine.

[Julia1981]

Our boy is 11 months. He has never let us put him to bed while awake. We have to give him his milk then let him fall asleep in our arms and wait a long time until he is in a deep sleep before we put him in his cot.

If we try and put him down before this, he immediately starts screaming and gets hysterical - nothing we do then will soothe him.

Tonight it's taken us nearly three hours to get him to bed and he has been sick twice and we've had to change all his clothes, bedding etc.

If we try to leave him to cry he is sick within a couple of minutes. We don't know what to do and feel we can't carry on like this.

Any advice appreciated.

Sounds so familiar! My DD was exactly the same - she would be sick in a matter of minutes of being left alone so we could never leave her to self soothe - it just wasn't an option.

In the end I found other ways to get her to sleep and sleep deeply. Here's a few ideas that worked for us -
We moved nap time earlier so that she was up by 1pm - that meant she was really tired by 7pm. We did a solid bedtime routine incorporating a few simple baby massage moves acupressure points which would get DD to calm down, fall asleep more easily and sleep more deeply - really helpful when you're child is over tired.

I also paid particular attention to DD's diet in the afternoon and evening and gave her sleep inducing foods. We actually found that gluten aggravated sleep - and now we are gluten free.

Also we used calming aromatherapy and Bach flower remedies to help with separation anxiety. Sounds a faff but was easy one we got in the swing of it. It helped so much that she was falling asleep within minutes and sleeping longer stretches of time and deeper too. Sitting in a darkened room every night for 3 hours smelling dinner burning in the oven downstairs used to be the most frustrating time of my day! It's liberating to get your evenings back to yourself.

I blog about my DD's sleep it was so bad - some of the posts may be of interest to you - here's the acupressure post which I found really amazing -
mydaughterwontsleep.com/2013/12/27/the-sleep-inducing-power-of-acupressure/
..and the sleep inducing foods post too - mydaughterwontsleep.com/2014/05/18/sleep-inducing-foods-for-you-and-your-child/

Sorry for long post...good luck and best wishes

I appreciate your reply so much, thank you. I wouldn't wish this on anyone, but it's good to know he is not the only baby to behave like this! I often fee like everyone else has it so much easier than us, which makes it worse.

There are some great ideas here which we will definitely try. Thank you.