Hi
I'll ask the question first and give info further down...
Our little girl wakes frequently (around 5 times) per night and needs us to go into her room to put her dummy in and lay her on her side. Any ideas on how to get her to sleep through?
Our daughter is 14 months old and we have stupidly put off any sort of sleep training until now. It's now got to a point where the routine we have slipped into needs to change. We would settle her at about 7pm by sitting by her cot holding her hand. She would generally drop off within 5 mins but would wake several times between her bed time and ours - 11pm ish. Each time one of us would have to go into her room and hold her hand until she dropped off. There would be a point in the night where the hand holding would no longer work and she would end up in our bed - which by no means is a perfect solution. The rest of the night would be pretty rotten as she would wriggle around and keep the one of us that was in bed with her awake pretty much all night.
Anyway, we got to the point where we realised things needed to change so decided to bite the bullet and find a technique we could work with and stay consistent to. My wife found CTCT as described by Jo Frost. We have always been against just leaving the littles crying but this seemed a reasonable compromise for us. We've been going with it for 3 days now and I must say how well it's working for our daughter. Night one was pretty awful and we had a 2 and a half hour stretch at around 2.30am where she cried and cried but eventually went off (of course we followed Jo's advice and she wasn't on her own for that 2.5 hours). Now though, things are so much better. We've gone from having our little girl hijack our bed every night to her staying in her cot for the full night. We are by no means where we need to be but things are so much improved.
The problem we have is that although or little girl has come round to the idea that we won't hold her hand to go to sleep she still wakes frequently and needs some level of intervention. I think part of the issue is that she uses a dummy and she will wake in the night, one of us will go in and put her dummy in, lay her on her side then leave the room. 9 times out of 10 she will settle herself back to sleep. I think the wakings are habitual and wanted some advice on how to resolve this part of the problem so we all get a full nights sleep.
Naps are also a bit of a problem. We've used the same CTCT for naps but she takes a lot longer to settle and will only nap for around 30 minutes. She has a morning nap around 10.30am and afternoon nap around 2pm.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks