Tuesday 31 January 2012

Finally...?

We have had loads of trouble with Alex sleeping lately. Well, if I'm honest, we've had trouble with him sleeping since he was born. He was definately NOT a textbook sleeper. None of the timeframes or strategies fitted him, so it was always tons of trial and error and lots of sleepless nights for us.

A few months ago, Alex's trick was waking up, ready for the day to start, at 5am (see earlier posts for my opinion on that!). Recently he has been waking up several times during the night, coming into our room and not leaving until he got to lay in our bed for a while. This usually ended in screaming matches or one of us laying with him in his bed until he went to sleep~ and often us falling asleep there too.

It made me start to doubt the wisdom of getting him out of the cot and into a bed before the age of 2. Megan coped ok, so we assumed he would too. Of course they are very different sleepers, so perhaps we shouldn't have assumed he would setlle the same way.

I was desperate for a solution and was hoping our Maternal Child Health Nurse would have some ideas at Alex's 2yr check up. Sadly our Super-woman nurse was away and we had a fill-in who didn't know much at all :( However, she did ask if he got 12-13 hours of sleep in 24hours, including his daytime sleep, which he did.

But it got me thinking. Since Alex has never fitted into normal sleep routines, maybe he didnt need as much sleep as everyone else his age. His dad can certainly survive on very little sleep, so we tested the theory.

We started keeping him up during his day sleep, and putting up with "Mr Cranky-Pants" until bedtime. Lo-and-behold, he went to sleep very easily (this has been a fight lately, too) and slept all night until about 7am. Heaven!

Hopefully, this new routine will continue and we will be able to catch up on some much needed sleep. I will miss that 1-2 hours of quite time that was usually his naptime, but if it means a full night's sleep, I'll happily trade!

3 comments:

Veronica Foale said...

Amy, my eldest, was not a text book sleeper either. In fact, she was a nightmare.

At five now, while she has trouble falling asleep again (but I need another glass of water/to use the toilet/it's too hot) she doesn't wake up (usually) when she is up overnight.

Hang in there, it DOES get better, and she improved loads by three.

For the record, she dropped her day sleep at 20 months, which did make bedtime nicer.

M & A's World said...

Thanks, glad to hear there is hope in the future!

Viana said...

Yay, glad you found something that is working for now! I was devastated right early on with Cooper to find that he seems to take after his dad with being a night owl and not needing much sleep either! (I'm a morning person who likes a fair bit of sleep, but slowly learning to sleep in with Cooper when he allows, lol) I must admit to taking Cooper out and about to keep him awake and happy longer so that he'll sleep better afterwards.

(Hmmm... I'm trying to remember the timeline of when he was getting really feral at night in relation to when I started working on lengthening his daytime sleeps to 'appropriate' baby sleeps as advised...)

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