Sleep!

[ailbhe]

Rob brought Linnea up to bed this evening, and returned her to bed four times in total, repeating "Nighttime, time for bed." It took 25 minutes for her to stop crying and fall asleep.

That's five minutes less than last night.

We can survive this, all three of us, and in the end it will be better. It will, won't it?

(I chose the phrase because staying in bed is an attainable goal; going to sleep may not be).

Comments

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

Yes, you'll survive it and in the end it will be better.

It sounds like this radical approach is what's needed at this point in things, but once you're at a better bedtime state, you might consider figuring out ways to develop a bedtime routine that she looks forward to rather than fighting. We've gone through big bedtime fighting times with Liam, but now he excitedly recites the next steps of his routine and goes to sleep peacefully and happily most nights. It does take us most of an hour, all told, but we trade off various tasks.

We had a well established routine before, but then something changed for Liam and he started fighting sleep. Our way of resetting things was to do a really radical change of the routine - we changed order of events, location of things, added a timer to his bath, etc. He's gone from being the kid who'd yell "No sleep!" when he saw pictures of sleeping children in books, to being a kid who loves to "play nap" and tuck his babies in to bed.

[ailbhe]

Oh, the rest of the bedtime routine is fine, has been down pat for ages - it's just the staying-in-bed-until-asleep part we've not done. Ever.

Linnea loves to play sleep, and has done for ages. She tucks everyone up - teddy, donkey, horsey, rabbit, doggie, Mammy, 'Nea - and says nightnight sleeptight and closes her eyes and snores. It's only at bedtime she won't do it.

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

The rest of our bedtime routine was trooping along fine as well, it was just taking longer and longer every night to get him to stay in bed, relax and fall asleep, and it was becoming more and more of a fight. Doing the radical shake-up of the whole routine seemed to help break that pattern without causing a huge battle.

And who knows, maybe he would have reached this point on his own without any changes - it's so hard to know what's developmental and what's environmental.