As the title says my DD is 18mo and is absolutely not a "good" sleeper. She never has been to be honest, we have just slogged through.
I thought we had bedtimes sorted when we went down to 1 nap but nothing stays the same does it!
She sleeps more easily in the mornings so we have been pushing her one nap later, until I realised that if she slept past 1:30pm she was a nightmare getting to sleep.
It seemed she needed to be up for at least 6 hours to actually fall asleep at bedtime, lately it is getting on for 6.5/7 hours before she will drop off and I am just so drained. It taking about an hour to get her to sleep at the moment by which time we don't have much of an evening left. The only plus point is her "false starts" have started to calm, so when she goes to sleep she has actually been staying asleep for a couple of hours meaning me and my partner actually have some time together. However as she isn't getting to sleep until 8:30 some nights, we don't have much energy to even watch tv together before going to bed ourselves.
This is a basic summery of our routine
6:30am Wake up
12pm nap
1/1:30pm wake from nap
Dinner 6/6:30pm
Bed 7:30pm but we are up with her until 8:30pm - breastfeeding/rocking/singing until she gives in. It's like she's not tired enough but surely that is a big enough window? What are you thoughts?
Between dinner and getting into bed, she will usually have a dance around the kitchen whilst we clear up, then we brush teeth and PJs and nappy, then story.
The only thing that might not be helping is that to brush her teeth I let her watch a 2 minute YouTube video to brush her teeth, this has been the most successful time we have had with teeth brushing after stressing she wasn't getting them brushed properly.
What do you think what are you doing?
Sorry for the essay 🤦🏻♀️