DD1 is taking up to 2 hours to fall asleep at night. She gets quite dozey on her bottle (which she still won't hold herself) but as soon as she has finished drinking, she's up and ready to party again. So its like 7.45, and we put her to bed.
She only just fell asleep before at around 9.25pm. And all that time, she will talk to herself in there, chat, giggle, play with her toys - everything - except bloody sleep! And I know she is tired because she only has an hour sleep during the day - otherwise it can take 3 hours to get her to sleep.
She just lays there and twitches all the time, her legs mainly - its like she can't keep them still. And because she does that - she can't "switch off". You can see that all she wants to do is go to sleep - but she just can't. So at the moment, when she sits up in bed and bounces wanting to play, I walk out of the room (usually I sit beside her stroking her back trying to get her to go to sleep).
She'll let out a wail, maybe cry for 30 seconds - 1 minute - and then she'll be all happy and start playing and chatting again. If I leave it 5 minutes and go back in there, she'll be sitting in the middle of her bed, happily playing with her bear, or doona, or pillow - ANYTHING BUT FREAKING SLEEPING.
Its totally doing our head in. How can we get her to switch off? We've tried lavender in the bath, massage before bed, braeurs calm stuff - EVERYTHING - and still she won't SLEEP.
So between her doing this - or doing this AND waking up in the middle of the night and doing the same thing then for a few hours - and DS waking up in the middle of the night and crawling into our bed - the newborn is the only one without bloody sleep issues!!!
I'm so tempted to take her to the doctor and get a script for something to help relax her, or take her to sleep school. She's nearly 17 months and just will not sleep - it can't be normal.
How do you help them to "switch off"?
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