cat napping at night and late bedtime

[Peony]

Any hope of turning this around? Just when I think I have dealt with every sleep problem out there and yet another child of mine proves that I haven't.


DS has been my "easy" sleeper, he doesn't wake 50 billion times a night, just a normal amount, but he is driving me insane lately. He turns 10 months this week and has gotten into this habit of going down around 7pm, napping for 20 minutes and then staying up until 11-12am. Yawn. I should mention that I usually go to bed at 10pm and I have to up for the day by 6am to send kids off to school. I've tried wearing him down to sleep, nursing to sleep in arms, and then laying down in bed, nursing to sleep in bed and then sneaking away and even just lying there holding him and he STILL wakes up and thinks the rest of the night is for playtime. In a ideal world this would work, I could sleep in, he could sleep in, but such is not my life. He wants to sleep in until 9-9:30am, doesn't work when I need to leave to drop DD1 off at school at 7:45. So he just is a grumpy mess. I am standing at the kitchen counter right now wearing him to sleep because since he slept in today (DH took DD1 to school today but that can't work everyday), he is just now getting ready to take his first nap, and I have to leave the house for school pickup between 2-2:30. He needs to go to bed earlier! Any hope?

[MujerMamaMismo]

It feels really mean but the only solution I came up with to a similar problem was to push DS's bedtime out a bit later. By 6pm my DS was ready for bed which only resulted in a nap and reset the sleep button, blowing us out to a midnight 2nd bedtime. I started keeping him awake until closer to 7.30 and the 2nd bedtime was no longer an issue.

How does he nap? Does he have any consistent patterns? Could you make his last nap a bit later in order to push bedtime back a bit?

[Peony]

I start bedtime for the older two at 7pm, DD2 is usually asleep between 7:30 and 8, DD1 is iffy. She has insomnia so some nights she goes to bed then, other times she is up to late. I can't push bedtime for DD2 back any later, DH does it anyway.



Last night was so bad, he went to bed at 7:30, slept until 8 and then was up. Until 1:30am.


I'm sure that naps are part of the problem. They are not consistent, I have 3 children, I can't be home twice a day for naps. I try to make sure that one nap a day is at home, the other one is almost always out and out. He never naps at the same time because he always wakes up at different times. 3-4 days a week he naps regularly around 10 to whenever, could be 30 minutes or 3 hours, the other days I am not home in the mornings but may be in the afternoon. His afternoon nap is never good, even if I am at home. Since he is finally asleep, I have to get some work done, I work part time from home and this late bedtime has made it impossible for me to get anything done.