Mama PlaygroundA Blog for Moms

After you have long since become confident in your child’s sleep patterns. Well after sleep training, teething, and self soothing. When a child is old enough to truly invoke confidence by you in their ability to sleep the hearty 12 consecutive hours through the night, then they go backwards. How can this be? Why was I never told this fact? Apparently it is so common as to be expected that a young child changes sleeping habits long after you have written them off as a consistently good sleeper.

My oldest child began at 2 1/2 years old to wake at night either crying or just getting up, pitter pattering down the hall, and waking us up. Either my husband or I would go in to her room with her and tuck her back in. I can’t really see what she gets out of it. At first we indulged her in extra soothing and would lay down beside her and comfort. We thought it was a phase, or possibly nightmares. We quit that though and now stumble mindlessly, sometimes dizzily bouncing off of walls down the hall, and possibly manage a mumble and a hug. Why are we slipping backwards?!

Like many parents, we invested early in sleep training. We did the best we could to have her up and running sleeping well at night times. For the most part I would say we were very successful. She is a great sleeper and made a nearly seamless transition to big girl bed very early on. We were lulled in to a false sense of security with nearly a year of consecutive nights of glorious repose from her while we sleep trained her young twin sibblings. I never imagined a backslide to us waking at night consistently with our oldest. The irony of it all is that we had just barely cleared the hurdle of having her twin sisters sleeping extremely consistently for 12-14 hours of uninterupted sleep at night. Oh the glory of that short week before our oldest threw us for a loop. Help!