After 4 years of broken sleep...

[coffeenwine]

Our youngest has started to sleep in longer stretches at 2 years old (we had a previous 2 years on no sleep before she was born).
Strange thing is with DD starting to do 6 hour stretches, and getting more sleep, I feel even more tired!
Anyone else had this??

Haven't had this (I wish!), but have heard of it. While you are asleep, hormones are produced in your brain to keep you asleep. This is why if you wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle you still feel tired, but at the end of a sleep cycle you feel well rested because those hormone levels are lower.

Presumably either:
A) the longer stretch means your hormone levels are getting higher, meaning you feel more tired when you do wake
B) her wake-ups used to coincide with your sleep cycles, but now don't.

Hopefully if she is sleeping a 6 hour stretch this shows that she is able to link sleep cycles and/or self settle whenever she does come out of one, which might well mean the 6 hours gets longer fairly soon.... fingers crossed!

Congratulations on the 6 hours!

P.s. What was it that did it with the 6 hours I the end? Or did DD just start doing longer stretches on her own? Always curious as to what people do

Thanks for your reply
Yeah, I thought it might be something along those lines...

We had the same pattern of sleep (or no sleep) with my eldest. We had done variations of gentle cry it out all through as I dont cope well with no sleep (who does?!) but nothing seemed to revolutionise things as people say. And if things got better, they would often go back to waking etc.
After about 2 years both their sleep cycles seemed to get longer, my DD has also just dropped all naps in the day and even though she sometimes gets a bit too tired, it seems to have pushed her in the right direction.
I wish i had a great answer for you, and total respect and awe to you if you are parenting on no sleep. I found it the toughest thing in my life so far....