New sleep challenge

bloverde

LO is 13mo. Always been a high maintenance guy, bad sleeper. Our solution for the past 34 months has been our mattress on the floor, with a baby mattress on my side of the bed.

For the last week or so, he has decided not to go to sleep. We've had a bedtime routine since 6wks old. It ends with nursing and me putting him down awake with a paci. Well for the past week, he nurses, takes the paci and then proceeds to crawl around the bedroom for up to 2 hours. Nothing I do can get him to sleep, until he decides he's tired and crawls back to nurse. He still gets up at the same time in the morning.

Is this a phase? I need my nights back. I can't have my baby staying up until 9:30 every night.

TiffanyBerry

You can't make him sleep.  Once they stop nursing to sleep, the how-long-it-takes-to-fall-asleep part is all on them.  You can enforce the rules you can enforce though.  So, when my daughter stopped nursing to sleep on our shared floor bed, the rule was that she had to stay in bed.  If she stepped her feet out of bed, I picked her up and put her back in bed - even one foot off the bed.  Yes, there's a period where it's a bit of a game while she figures out the rules, and then there's the "I'm going to whine and cry and pout about this" phase, and then there's the "well, I can't get around it" phase.  We also had to implement a rule that she had to lay down and be somewhat still and quiet (trying to "sleep") or I would leave for a few minutes.  Again, it took a while, but we got there.

ncbelle

Is he close to learning to walk?  That killed sleep at our house!  I would also try an earlier bedtime - that often solves the problem of the long bedtime.

bloverde

He cruises, but doesn't stand alone yet. So not terribly close. We start bedtime at 7:30. Should I try earlier? He's sleeping usually 96:30. He used to sleep 7:306:30.

RioG1978

When my daughter stopped nursing to sleep she was doing the same thing... she'd nurse, get down, cruise around, want to nurse, get down, play, want to nurse, etc.

 so I changed our routine totally.  Now when it's bedtime we nurse in my room then come back to her room to rock.  It takes 5 minutes tops to rock her to sleep, and has totally solved the problem.

 I know at some point we'll need to progress from rocking to sleep, but I'm waiting until that becomes obvious.  This is working very well.  You might want to think about changing up your routine - it sounds like it's not working for him anymore.