Resistance to going to sleep at 2?

[MartiesMom2B]

I don't know what is with Martie but for the past 3 nights the child refuses to go to bed at night. She used to be so easy to go to sleep. We would put her in anywhere from 8:00 - 8:30 and she'd either fall asleep or play until she fell asleep. Now she refuses to go to sleep and has been screaming in her crib for almost an hour. Has anyone else dealt with this? Do you think she's overtired and I should put her down earlier. Please help, DH & I are getting very tired and this is actually starting to put a damper on marital life, which is upsetting.

Thanks!
-Sonia

[Karenn]

Is she still taking a nap? She might not be tired enough. I know that Colin reached a point where if he napped too long or too late, we had to bump his bedtime later, otherwise he would just play in his crib forever and then get frustrated if he wasn't asleep. It was hard because he still desperately needed the nap, but he would stay up 'till 9 or 10 if he had it! We started putting him to bed an hour later, and waking him from his nap at 3:30 and that seemed to fix it.

HTH,

[egoldber]

I was also going to suggest that maybe she is not tired enough. With my DD, very suddenly, she stopped going to sleep easily at night. For us, the issue was the nap. If she had a nap, she wouldn't sleep at night. If she didn't nap, she slept like a champ at night.

Can you experiment with letting her not nap during the day? Or taking a shorter nap? It seems scary at first, but after the first couple weeks with no nap, I actually prefer it now. Its really freeing to not be tied to the nap schedule. And another upside is that she now goes to bed earlier at night.

HTH,

[christic]

We had this happen too, around 2 1/2. For Alice it seems to have been the first stage of finally giving up her nap. She had always been in bed and asleep by around 7:30, but then suddenly couldn't get to sleep until at least 8:30, somtimes closer to 10. Like you, my husband and I really missed the long evening together. Eventually the nap went haywire and now she's napping only sporadically (miss that too!) but back to an early bedtime. I think it must be fairly common--when I was trying to figure the whole thing out I got out Weissbluth and sure enough there was a little spike in the "bed time" chart right around 2 1/2.

I think it will pass and that some fiddling with the nap might help in the meantime.

Good luck!
Chris

[newbelly2002]

Sonia,

We struggled with this as well. For us, the problems preceded a huge jump in shortened naptime. All at once Dante went from a 3 hour nap to a 1.5 hour nap. But for about 3 weeks inbetween he went on a bit of a napstrike. What finally had to happen is that we now wake (eek!) him at 1.5 hours and don't let him nap past 4 pm. It seems horrible to wake a sleeping baby, I know. But if we don't, his body seems to process naptime as night time and just throws off his entire schedule.

Try first making sure that there's at least 4 hours between Martie's wake-up from nap and bedtime. If that doesn't help, try shortening teh nap of just giving it a bit of time. Right around 2 and then again right around 2.5 seem to be major sleep disruptions, as so many folks have mentioned.


i hope for your sake that this blip passes quickly!