Bed Time

I have a confession to make! Grace still won't go to sleep by herself! She has to have a bottle in order to go to sleep and although it's not a huge deal atm, I want to be able to get her out of the habbit of not going to sleep by herself now, to avoid having a toddler that screams and crys and climbs out of her cot. I know I'm not the only one to ever do this with my first (LOL) so has anyone got any tips?! We've tryed putting her down and just letting her cry herself to sleep, but she has got a much stronger will than Pete and I lol, and cryed for about an hour and a half before we went in and she'd got herself so worked up she didn't sleep til about 4 in the morning.

a bottle at bedtime is fine as long as baby isn't actually put to bed with it... if that's what you are talking about, then try gradually moving her out of her room while she's having a bottle.. ie, one night sit on a chair next to bed, next move the chair further.. etc until evertually you are in the lounge. we made it a rule from the start no bottles in bed, and up until she stopped having bottles about 2 months ago, paris would have a bath, then have a bottle, lying on her cushion on the floor, then off to bed. now she has moved on to having some warm milk in a straw cup, while one of us reads a story.

It's not too late, and yep it sucks to let them cry, but there's nothing stopping you from going in, giving her a cuddle, resettling her and trying again...in fact i think that works better than just leaving them for hours to cry... cos they just get really upset and scared. sometimes when paris is having a bad night (not too often now, but had a fair share when she was Grace's age) we resettled her a few times a night, and each time, we'd remind her that we will come and check in a few minutes.. sometimes a little reassurance that you are coming back is enough to help them sleep.

Edited by mum2paris

I havent used it but apparently phenagren (sp) works great over 3 or 4 nights to get them out of the habit.

Phenargan is an antihistamine that makes kids drowsy, you can get it from the chemist. Be warned tho that it can have the opposite effect - I tried it on Maya when we flew to London last year to help settle her on the plane and instead of making her drowsy it sent her bouncing off the walls for 24 hours straight. Needless to say it was a veeeery long flight!

Because Maya had to be fed hourly when she was sick, after she was better we had heaps of trouble resettling her into sleeping thru the night. In the end I basically just perservered with the controlled crying thing, the first night she screamed for over 2 hours, but by the third night she was over it and slept thru. It was really hard listening to her cry, I ended up ringing Plunketline and they kept me on the line till she finally went to sleep which was great because I was on my own at home and didn't have any other support.

Good luck with everything!

Yep, I asked the pharmacist about that as Maya was only 18 mths and he was so blase about it that I checked with my doc. She said there haven't been any adverse reactions in studies, but there haven't been that many done so they don't have much reliable info to go on. But it is prescribed quite a lot for kids with allergies even as young as 9-10 mths. I avoided it because of the possible drowsiness factor, we used Zyrtec for Maya's allergies which is a new generation antihistamine and safer for under-2's.

Gwyn, have you tried using a safeT sleep???
I didn't really have a huge problem with the whole night time sleeping thing as Hannah usually goes to sleep while breastfeeding or when I wrap her up and put her in her bed. But during day sleeps she would stand up in her cot and scream and scream and scream, working herself into a huge state.
Managed to track down the safeT sleep that I had somewhere in the back of the cupboard and found that if Han couldn't stand up in her cot then she fell asleep a whole lot quicker. Still have some crying time but it generally only lasts 10 minutes before she falls asleep.

Might work? I suppose it was good for Hannah because she has always been wrapped up while sleeping. Depending if Gracie likes being wrapped or not it might be worth a try?