Looking for some advice on my 21m olds naps/schedule. She was having one hour long naps for a while and was sleeping well at night up until november when she started to have episodes of waking at 3am and not going back to sleep at all and I took this (perhaps wrongly) that we needed to shorten her nap. This worked ok for a while but since beginning of this month her nighttime sleep is all over the place. She is definitely teething and had been unwell with a cold now recovered from, but either side of that has been the same unpredictable and random waking, either multiple times a night for a short time each, or just once for up to three hrs a night. I'm starting to wonder if the 3am waking was just a phase and we shouldn't have been so quick to shorten the nap. We've even tried cutting nap out completely twice as I read it's not unheard of for them to be ready to drop naps completely at this age, but neither time we tried that has worked well, she's become completely overtired and still not slept well at night. She's always gone to bed between 6.30 and 7 ever since we naturally took her lead when she was a few months old. Does she suddenly need a later bedtime? Tonight it's been 1am she's woken and just got her settled 1.5 hrs later, but I fully expect she will wake again going by recent patterns. There's always the possiblity that nothing we change will help and this is just yet another regression we have to wait to end. It just feels like they are neverending and all I do is become mentally drained as well as physically exhausted trying to work out what we're doing wrong.
My first child was such a good sleeper that Id never found myself questioning every move and change I make with as I have in the last 2 years and completely lost with it all.