Help me find a way to get my 14 month old to go back to sleep.

[artichokes]

This is a slight repeat from a thread I started elsewhere but I am repeating part of it here as I need some help from those who know about sleep...

DD is 14 months and has slept through the night since 7 months. Three weeks ago I left her with her Dad for a week while I went away with work. Since I have been back she has been suffering from seperation anxiety. This has had an effect on her sleep as she finds it so scary when I put her in the cot. She will go down at bedtime but if she wakes in the night she will not go back down. For the past two nights she has been up since 3am.

When she wakes in the night I go to her room, keep it dark and pick her up and shush her. She screams. I sit in the dark and BF her. She is fine. I gently get up and lower her back into cot. She screams blue murder and will be sick if I don't go back. I lie by her cot and pat her. She wimpers but is OK until I remove my hand. Even if she seems to be asleep the hand removing wakes her up. She screams.... If I lay her next to me in our bed she romps around as if it is morning.

We are all exhausted and DH and I have very important weeks at work looming. Help me get through tonight. What more can I do????

Oh Artichokes here we are again. I just posted on your other thread. My dd is same age and exactly the same.

Am going to try Baby Whisper method of PU/PD next weekend. She also does something called Walk in/walk out as well. Have a look at website

Hi Fizzbuzz. Did you see my post on my other thread? How do you get your DD back to sleep at the mo? Did anything trigger her sleep problems recently? I cannot beleive we might be back to PU/PD again. We did that at 7 months and we thought were passed all that?

Does anyone have any oearls of wisdom? Last night she woke at 3.20 and I fed her to calm her and then and lay her back in the cot and lay down next to it patting her. As long as I kept patting she was OK but took an hour to drop off and another hour before she was sleeping soundly enough for me to remove my hand. So at 5.30 we were all properly asleep again and then she woke at 6.45... DH is valiantly trying to get her down for her nap as I type. It does not sound promising.

Help.

No magic answers I'm afraid, I wish there were

The only thing which worked with us was putting a bed in her room and one of us sleeping in that. As long as someone is in the room she is OK . However when she gets worked up, we just say shush from the bed and that tends to calm her. Then when she is fast asleep we go back to our own bed, sometimes having gone to sleep in her room and sometimes not.

I try to avoid patting in the night as she then would like it all the time.

However she is often awake for or 5 times a night, and we just manage to get by with this method.

As it is separation anxiety which is causing it, we just try to be there at night for her as much as possible.

TBH this has been going on for 6 months now, cannot do cc or WI/WO. Have considered laying her back down when she starts which is BW method, but just working up to facing it again. Also gradual retreat method is recommended for this sort of thing.

HTH

Also try not to take her out of her cot, or feed her (try water)

ds 14 months occasionally does this. I just put it down to seperation anxiety. We have recently moved house so there have been big changes. We do bring him into bed with us if he is really screaming as we are in a town house and I don't want to wake the neighbours.