1 year old used to sleep brilliantly...

[philippad]

Can anyone help? 12 month old DS slept brilliantly from 9 weeks until he was about 8 months old. Since then he's had a series of colds (which ended at Christmas) and nothing but broken nights. He goes to bed regularly at 7pm and will either sleep through until 5.30am and then refuse to go back to sleep or wake at least once during the night badly enough for us to go to him before sleeping until 6-ish. We use controlled crying when we need to and only get him up when essential, so we're hoping he's not cring for company. We've had about 3 unbroken nights since before Christmas. I'm 6 months pregnant and utterly exhausted. What can I do to get my good sleeper back?!

We had a similar problem.
We moved dd's bedtime back an hour to 8pm and started giving her weetabix at bedtime as well as her bottle.
If she woke up crying I went in twice and twice only, first time I picked her up and offfered her a bottle said only things like "it's sleepytie now" or "night night, mummy loves you" etc just sleepy things to reinforce that it's not time to be up yet, and if she woke again I just went in, lay her back down once said night-night and left the room with no eye contact.
If she refused to settle I did not go back to her at all until a reasonable hour. This only went on 2 nights when she cried 4 a long time and my heart broke but on the 3rd night she only woke once and I did the "sleep-time, night-night" thing and she slept thru to the morning, the next night she didn't wake at all and slept from 8pm to 8am.
Sometimes she still wakes but is easily settled with a drink and a quick cuddle. Not ideal but wakings are short-lived and I can cope with them!

Thanks Lilypie. I'm not sure we can move his bedtime back at all as he's always ready to crash by 7, but topping him up with some cereal is worth a shot, as is being a bit harder with the crying. We did find for a while in the autumn that we were giving in and cuddling him back to sleep because he'd always been such a good sleeper we thought there must be a problem if he was waking. Think we're over that now, but maybe we could take it a stage further. Why don't these babies come with individual manuals?! Did you find that daytime naps affected your DD's night sleeps? DS still sleeps quite a lot during the day, but when I tried cutting back on his naps he slept even worse at night as he was so overtired.

I think daytime sleep has a great deal to do with night waking, too much sleep and they're not tired enough to go all night, too little and they're cranky and restless with overtiredness. I think at 12 months dd was only having 1 nap a day of about 1 - 1.5 hours at lunchtime.

Moving her bedtime to 8pm was a gradual thing, started with 7:15, then after a few days 7:30 etc, soooo glad we did it now tho as DH has more time with her in the evening and if she does ever sleep for 12 hours I still dont feel like I'm up at the crack of dawn when she's up at 8am.

7 - 5:30 sounds perfectly normal for a 12 month old. My dd is also 12 months and sleeps 8-6, so a little less than your ds. She has one nap after lunch of around 1.5 hours.

at the unbroken nights you had previously though - my dd didn't start sleeping through until a couple of months ago.

I know, I know... I did used to feel smug at times (although tried never to show it!). Trouble is all the non-sleepers now sleep and my sleeper doesn't. It's reassuring to know I'm not the only one with an early waker though.