Toddler sleep hell.... help!!!!!

[cartchick]

C has had the same bedime routine since he was about 4 months old - milk, bath, teeth, stories and sleep by 7.30ish. He usually rolls over and goes off to sleep.

Those days are SO gone! :no: For the past 4 weeks he's been able to escape from his cot and open the bedroom door - so we now just put the cot side down.

Now he just DOES NOT want to sleep at bedtime. He will use any excuse... "wee wee"... "I want to poo"... but mainly he wants to sleep in mummy and daddies bed with one of us lying there with him. Of course in utter desparation we've given into him a few times. :rolleyes:

If we leave him he screams blue murder and is out of the room in a flash. He's been utterly hysterical several times and unless he has had hardly any daytime sleep he has been awake til 9.30 - 10.30!:faint: This means we get NO time to ourselves and it's too late to have dinner by that point.

The other night utterly at the end of my tether I ended up letting him stay with me on the sofa in front of the tv until he drifted off at 10.30 (desperately hoping he wouldn't pick up any "f*cks" off the F Word :happyno:). I had to work that night, and I didn't get to start work on my presentation for a new client the next day until 11pm and I ended up cancelling the meeting :sigh:. As I'm now the sole breadwinner, me not working in the evenings is not an option.

Do you think he's 'just being a 2 year old' and he'll grow out of it? Homelife has also been a bit fraught atm with everything going on.

Sorry for mammoth post - if anyone has ANY advice on what I could do to fix this I would be so so grateful. :flowers:

ccxx

[bisy backson]

:higgies: we went through this too and after a couple of weeks of getting no sleep because S was in our bed, then sitting outside his door to stop him escaping we installed a stairgate in his bedroom door.

best thing we ever did.

we had to sit through several nights of screaming and begging to be let out 'pleeeease mamma, pleeease let me out' :cry:for an hour and a half to start with, but after about four or five days of this :rolleyes: it reduced to 10 minutes or so, and then he just went to bed normally again. soooo relieved.

might be worth a try but you do have to have nerve of steel for the initial period.

good luck, its crap when they do this isn't it!

splash was probably about 18/19 months when we did this by the way

bbxx

[Lynz39]

God its been ages since I spoke to you girles! Hope you are all well.
We put a stairgate or the bedroom door. The little toad kept getting out of bed and coming through to us during the night. The stairgate was a godsend. He occasionally still gets up and shouts at the gate but we just go in and pop him back in to bed. The other thing I have done is set a timer on the light in his room to come on at 7am. I tell him he cant get up until the light comes on. Sometimes works. He is 2.5 though so I think it all depends their age.