I wish someone else could get my toddler to sleep!

[scottishmommy]

Ok, this is really more of a vent than anything. I am so sick and tired of nursing my toddler to sleep. I work on the weekends and some evenings, and wish that once, just once, dh could that kid to sleep before I get home. The weekends are awful. She never takes a nap at the usual time, so when I get home she is incredibly irritable and even harder to get to sleep. To make matters worse she is a twiddler. I'm pregnant now, so I just CANNOT handle twiddling while pregnant. If I try to remove her hand from my nipple she FREAKS. I mean has a total tantrum. Today she wouldn't take a nap all afternoon, after hours of trying to get her to go to sleep and finally I yelled at dh to "take her in the f-ing car to get her to sleep". I was sooooo pissed. What to I need to do? Wean? What? Help!

[sundaya]

My DD is the same age as yours, and I'm due in July, so having some of the same issues. AAACK, the twiddling while pregnant is horrible.

My DD will also not sleep for anyone but me, and not in any way but by nursing. The car doesn't even work for us.

She doesn't nap anymore, but when she did, if it got too stressful, I'd can the whole deal and just put her to bed early. I had a 45 minute cut-off, if she wasn't asleep by then, we were just done and moved on with the day.

We've been working hard on the going to sleep without bfing thing. I tried the whole remove the nipple earlier and earlier every night.....talk about one po'd little girl. I was almost asleep and you did what...? Then, she was up and mad for 2 hours. So, not thinking it would work at all, a few days ago we started talking about how we weren't going to go to sleep with meemees anymore. I told her, many times, what our new bedtime routine would be....bath, pj's, brush teeth, meemees, book, story, cuddle to sleep (same routine, different order). To my huge surprise, it worked that night and the next night. Tonight it didn't, but she was over-tired. The next step we are going to take is for DH to attempt to take over the same routine after the meemees, and then finally, hopefully, get her to sleep without me in the house. We plan to again talk to her about it all day, and I've got my fingers crossed that it could work. I'm having a hospital birth, so we have to figure something out between now and then, or someone's going to have a terrible night or 2.

I don't know that I have any answers, but I'm right there with you, and it's frustrating and hard and exhausting. I hope you find a solution!

[lifeguard]

I actually stopped nursing ds to sleep in January. I thought I was actually starting the weaning process (so we could move on to the next step in fertility treatments) but then I fell pregnant! I started a week beforehand & told him it was coming - discussed it every day.

The first night went really well - but that just gave up false hope. To be quite honest it took about 6 weeks for us to fully adjust to the change. Within a week he had accepted he couldn't nurse to sleep anymore & stopped asking but he really struggled to fall asleep without it so we spent a LONG time some nights just lying quietly with him. And it really did cause him some sleep disturbance.

I know this doesn't sound too positive but honestly I am still glad we did it. I was really finding nursing him to sleep frustrating. And now we are on the first night of him going to sleep without us lying with him (& by us I mean me). I am currently sitting in the hallway with my laptop.