When we got back from New York, you had a really hard time sleeping for a few weeks. You would scream when we put you in your crib, it would take forever for you to fall asleep, you'd wake up during the night, or you'd wake up early. . .more often than not some combinations of all the above items. It was exhausting. I would often have to hold you until you fell asleep, then lay you down.
On this particular day you woke up way too early from your nap, but were still so tired that you fell asleep on me even after I brought you downstairs! That never happens! The pups were more than willing to cuddle up and nap too. They can't resist that body heat. I was afraid that you would fall off the couch, but I was more afraid of waking you up if I tried to move you, so I spent the whole nap with a hand on your back in case you fell. By the way, this is the Lightning McQueen blankie I made you after you fell in love with the movie Cars! You love your blankie.
One of the things we tried doing in order to get you back to sleeping normal was to put your mattress on the floor. We thought maybe the novelty of sleeping on the floor would appeal to you and make you more willing to lay down. Plus you had started to complain about "alligators" when it was sleeptime so the only thing we could think of was that maybe you were having nightmares and that made you scared of your crib. So maybe sleeping outside of your crib would shake up the scenery enough that you wouldn't have that association with sleep anymore. Since you still roll around a lot in your sleep we stuck your mattress in the corner of the room and barricaded the open side.
The mattress thing worked somewhat okay - you didn't mention alligators anymore, but you also didn't want to stay put when we left the room. So we had to sit there until you fell asleep, which could take nearly an hour because you would keep trying to talk to us. Also at least half the time you'd wake up in the night and would hop out of bed and come looking for us. So after only a week of that I decided enough was ENOUGH. I completely rearranged your room and took down all the nursery decorations so that hopefully it would seem like a completely different room to you. With your crib on a different side of the room than before I was hoping you wouldn't associate it with your previous nightmare problems. We did spend another week retraining you to fall asleep on your own, and by the end of the week things were really looking up! You would still complain when we put you down but would give up and go to sleep after just a couple minutes, and were sleeping through the night and through your naps again. Then at the end of the week I was in the middle of writing a post during naptime about how your sleep problems were finally over. . .when I heard your door close and a little voice say "hi mama!" You had figured out how to climb out of your crib! ARGH!! The sleep problems begin anew!
We bought a racecar toddler bed off of KSL figuring that if you could climb out of your crib, there was no point anymore. You LOVED it, but we had the same problems as when it was just the mattress on the floor. You wouldn't stay put. So after a week of that, I took the bottom of the crib out so that the mattress rested right on the floor with the crib walls around it - so the mattress part was several inches lower than before. Now you for sure couldn't climb out! We stuck you back in the crib. You weren't happy about not being able to sleep in the car bed but we stuck to our guns and just a couple short days later peace was restored. And finally, FINALLY, after a long 6 weeks, we were back to normal!
