Hi everyone,
I'm at my wits end with our firstborns sleep habits and am hoping that anyone here can share some ideas or experiences.
We have two children, our firstborn is coming up to 22 months and our newest is just 2.5 months old.
Life in general is pretty good, they're both lovely children most of the time. It's just that night times have become something of a nightmare recently with our firstborn with him being incredibly unsettled at night and us not really equipped to deal with it.
To set the scene, our first co-slept with us for a little under a year. This started mainly due to him having acid reflux, baby eczema making him very unsettled and a sensor on his back that just wouldn't allow him to settle in a cot. However, then it became more a matter of habit and circumstance. Circumstance in the sense that we'd moved house shortly after birth and rooms were not ready, that he might take ill and we'd feel bad about attempting separation, also that it became in a sense the easy option when we were already at our limit thanks to life in general being tough.
After around12 months, we transitioned to getting a crib to go by our bedside and he stayed in there comfortably in that situation for a further six months or so. However, with the birth of our second on the horizon, we finally sorted the nursery and moved him in there approx a month before the birth.
Things were relatively smooth at first, just a little wailing in the night when he woke up and we weren't there. That'd usually be solved by one of us sleeping on the floor next to him to soothe.
However, with the birth of number two, things had to change as with feeding the baby and managing recovery from the c-section, both of us would be needed in our bedroom. We wouldn't be able to stay on the floor to soothe our first, not that it wasn't high time we attempted a bit of separation/independence.
Looking to move things along in that sense, we've tried the following/things have occurred when he wakes in the middle of the night wailing:
- Go in to soothe, toddler calms down instantly and seems to go back to sleep. However, as soon as going to leave the room he starts up again. Leave him 5-10 mins to wail it out before rinsing and repeating.
Usually means about 2-2.5 hours of wailing, which when it starts at 1am isn't great for anyone (our poor poor neighbours).
- He escapes his crib! Despite being on the shorter side, he's clearly going to go into athletics given the ease in which he now escapes his crib.
To counter this and to keep him safe from roaming the house in the dark, where he could fall, we kept his door shut by tying the handle to the banister with some cord (with an easy release in case of emergencies). It was heart breaking to do so as it left us feeling like a prison wardens, but better him known to be safe was our thought.
The pattern went same as the first though, just this time with him climbing out of his crib and wailing at the door.
- A day or two later, we received a tall gate that we set up in the doorway to his room. We also adapted his crib to be a toddler bed by taking down the side. The thought being that we wanted to remove the chance he hurts himself while climbing out of his crib. The gate in place so that we can have an open door policy, which might make him feel less trapped, but while also being secure.
The result of this being that he took ages to get to sleep as there was no longer anything that kept him from roaming his room (there's mostly books and he went through pretty much all of those). Then, when it came to sleep, he was reluctant to sleep in his bed. I ended up lying down on the other side of his gate, thinking that my presence would help him to feel a bit more secure and less likely to flip out.
He ended up falling asleep on his side of the gate next to me. I lifted him into his bed as he slept, but when he woke up he totally flipped out and despite me being on a mat the other side of the gate, he called for my partner as well.
He eventually went to sleep again on his side of the gate next to me.
I had naively hoped that seeing me there would have given reassurance, then in time I could move the sleeping mat further away from his room, hopefully phasing out his reliance on us.
That just doesnt seem to be happening and if anything, he seems to be even more unsettled at night as time goes by.
We're under no illusion that we're the architects of a lot of these problems, from how we've effectively set his expectations in the past. We're a lot more mindful of this with our second (already comfortably sleeping in a cot by the bedside), but dwelling on what we should have done doesnt help us in the present.
Any thoughts on this would be really appreciated and thanks for reading that wall of text!