Having moved on to child number two, we thought we had the whole sleeping thing sussed...
Up until about 6 weeks ago DD was perfectly happy with a 60 minute nap in the morning, having dropped her afternoon nap at about 8 months. Then she would sleep from 7pm until 4am, then wake for just an ounce maybe of milk (or latterly, water) before settling back down until 6.00am
Ah, those blissful days.
Now she is refusing to sleep during the day and she is waking every night at either 1.30 or 3.30 and is refusing to settle down again. And she is in an incandescent mood - she wakes and is instantly up and rattling the side of the cot. When we try to settle her down she will scream her head off when we don't pick her up or when we lie her down under the covers. This then escalates and she drags all of her bedding over the side of the cot and throws it all out, along with anything else she can find, screaming at the top of her lungs. The minute we go to her she stops, smiles and holds up her hands. she does exactly the same when we try to put her down for naps. The nursery where she goes have the same problem with the daytime nap, and so does the nanny.
We have tried the following:-
- CC - two and a half hours and still going strong.... her screams escalate to the point of retching. I tried this for 3 weeks and there was no downturn in length/frequency - if anything it progressively got worse
- Stroking her while she lies in the cot - she will let us do this for a while then try to stand up again and start crying again
- Staying with her until she sleeps, doing the normal slow withdrawal stuff - seems to stimulate her even more - she will start babbling, moving round, crying etc
- Co-sleeping - she still wakes up and tries to crawl all over us, tries to stand up, tries to get out of bed, and screems when we try to stop or subdue her
- Swaddling - hahahahahahaha. worked when she was 6 weeks old but now she gets furious if we try to restrict her either by cuddling her or swaddling her.
- Getting her to bed earlier - nope - she won't go down
&) Getting her to bed later - she still wakes and is a bit cranky the next day from too little sleep
- Giving up, getting up. Works in terms of stopping the tears, but as a strategy it has obvious flaws
During the day she is sweetness itself - always cheerful, laughing, never seems to be tired. She has cut quite a few teeth which for sure upset her sleeping a bit but never created problems like these, and there has been no obvious changes to her routine/feeding. She always has plenty of supper, good wind-down, and she goes off to sleep like an angel of an evening....it's just that at some point during every night she turns into Bride of Chucky.
Any ideas?