15 month hell - help please

[parmavioletmartini]

Dd has always been quite a good sleeper and until recently has been sleeping through.

Now she is waking 2-3 times in the night often for 3 hours at a time. And I’m at my wits end. I just don’t know what to do. Neither she or I want to co sleep and never have. I have recently moved to one nap as she just didn’t seem tired for her morning nap and was not going off to sleep so well as her afternoon nap had crept later. Routine is as follows. Any advice would be much appreciated.

7.30 wake (although a few days she’s still asleep until 8ish because she’s been awake so much)
7.30 milk
8.30 breakfast
12 lunch
12.30 nap for around 2 hours just under
3 snack
6 dinner
6.30 bath
7.00 bottle and bed she goes down sleepy but awake and self settles in minutes. It’s not until midnight that the wake ups start.

Sorry for such a long post.

I don’t know the answer but you are not alone! My 9 month old has suddenly gone from 1 wake up at around 4 for a quick feed to 3-4 wake ups and at least one lasts for 2 hours with her mucking about. I am about to collapse from tiredness! I am co-sleeping because it’s the only way she’ll eventually settle, but get that you don’t want to.

Is she teething? I think there might be a developmental leap around 15 months which can bugger up sleep patterns for a few weeks.

Sorry for my non-answer! Hopefully someone comes along with some tips and you start getting some more sleep

It may not be her daytime routine It may be how she goes to sleep.
We sleep in a cycle - non R.E.M. Which is a deep sleep. Then you go into R.E.M. Sleep. This is where we dream. We then partially wake. The cycle takes between two to three hours.

What happens at partially waking time is that we check our environment and ourselves. If we are cold , need the loo etc it's at this point we wake. If nothing has changed we go back into non R.E.M. Sleep totally unaware we stirred.

With children many wake at partially waking time because their environment has changed. Dummy was in now fallen out. Light was on now off. Mum was laying with me now gone. Was asleep on sofa now in bed.

Some children stir find dummy , realise what's changed and will self settle back to sleep. However some won't and the change causes them to wake.

Does your D go to sleep and at partial waking something has changed. If it has maybe her environment needs to not change once asleep.

This may mean setting up a new bedtime routine but in my experience this is a big cause to a child's wakefulness and once solved makes a huge difference.

She goes to sleep without me there. Now it’s dark before her bedtime I don’t think the light has changed. It’s possible that something has changed from her bedtime routine but I’m racking by brains to think what that could be.

She never wanted a dummy and 15 months seems to late to introduce one. But she does have a comfort soft toy, which she still has when I go to her. She also sleeps in a sleeping bag.

Sorry also to add she has white noise which always plays all night.

It could literally just be overtiredness due to moving from 2 naps to 1 and she's in a transition stage of getting used to it.

DS2 is going throught the same thing and I genuinely think it's down to overtiredness. There's not much I can do to change his routine because he's at nursery and we follow their basic routine on his 'at home' days too. My theory is (as we've been through this with DS1) that he'll either get used to the sleeping pattern and adapt, or he'll get old enough that he's developmentally ready to cope with the routine.

Until then we're following the same well established and suitable bedtime routine - bed at the same time every night, encouraging a wake up time at the same time every morning (i.e. no lie ins to over-compensate for poor sleep during the night) and a regular 12/12.30pm naptime.

After 3 weeks or so we're getting there and have 1-2 nights a week when he sleeps without interruption. Onwards and upwards I hope for us both!

Hi, my 17 month has been doing the same thing all week. She has a 1.5-2 hour nap during the day and then falls asleep by 8. Recently she has been going to sleep at 9:30pm as she keeps making herself wake up. Then at 1:30am she wakes up and won’t go back to sleep until 4am! Its driving me and my husband crazy as we are constantly playing musical beds all night!! I really don’t know what to do and I don’t know what’s keeping her awake.

Just so you know, you are not alone!