I posted this in behaviour/development, but someone kindly told me to put it up here too - hope you can help. Sorry if this is long,and rambling but I am at my wits end, knackered and slightly incoherent. My 19 month old boy was a terrible sleeper until about one. In the last six weeks he has regressed to the point that we are going mad.
From the ages of one until about 17 months - he slept through and was really content. Until the last week he has always been happy to go down in to his cot and chat himself to sleep very contentedly. Last night was the worst night yet but his nights have been gradually building up to this. He refused to settle in his cot for over an hour, with us going up every ten minutes to put him down again. Then at 11pm he woke up screaming - his scream is blood curdling and sounds like he is frightened. I managed to settle him, but only for ten minutes - this went on for 5 hours with him hurling things out of his cot and his screaming becoming progressively more distressed.
We tried leaving him for slightly increasing increments, and every time we went back in he was happy to be put down and drifted off to sleep for another ten minutes or so. Finally we went into his room, turned on the lights and got him out of his cot at 4am. He was totally wired - clapping, laughing, chatting (nonsense) and climbing all over the furniture in his room. I then lay on the floor next to his cot holding his hand - every time I thought he was sleeping and removed my hand he would stand up and be inconsolable - so we used our last resort and took him into bed with us. Whereupon he crashed out straight away.
I am due to have my second in 4 weeks time, otherwise I would happily take him into bed during this "phase" (please tell me it is a phase?) but this seems untenable when we will have a baby in our room and possibly our bed feeding every couple of hours. I am also anemic at the moment and knackered (with SPD, so find it hard getting out of bed), hence the tone of despair!
I would be so grateful if someone else could share their experiences - is he manipulating us, or is he genuinely distressed and scared? How on earth do we resolve this before the baby comes? He is a bit of a late talker, but his interest in words and vocabulary seem to have taken off a bit in the last week - could this have anything to do with it? Thank you so much if you have got this far...