sleep and 18 month old

[TahliasMom]

dd has been a pretty good sleeper, pretty much on the same night schedule since 6 months, 7pm to 7am. but the last few nights have been horrific. she will go down at 7pm, wake up around midnight and stay up until 3 or 4 am! the whole time she's crying in her crib. first we'll ignore her for 5 minutes to see if she'll settle down. then we go in and give her the paci, get her all comfy and a minute later she's screaming. let her CIO. then we try to bring her into bed and she just plays around. last night after 2 hours of playing in our bed we put her back in the crib. she cried for 40 minutes and fell asleep. we felt so horrible but we're just exhausted at this point! she has all her teeth in, except for the last 4 molars so i don't think it's teething. she's not sick either. is this a weird phase? :(

[californiagirl]

Could be 2 year molars, or an ear infection, or something -- I think I'd try Tylenol and see if it helps.

When DD went through a playing-around-at-bedtime phase, I told her I'd stay with her as long as she was trying to go to sleep, and if she played around, I'd go away. Then she'd play around, I'd go away, she'd scream like a banshee, and eventually I'd ask if she wanted to try again and we'd give it another go. We combined that with finding the smallest useful unit of soothing, the smallest thing you can do that actually makes her feel better -- for DD it can be just talking to her from a distance, or standing in her doorway, or putting a hand on her foot, or rubbing her back, or cuddling her depending on how needy she's feeling, but we try them in order. One night she made DH come back to the doorway 20 times, but she soothed as soon as she saw his face every time. Some version of that might be easier on everybody's nerves than CIO.