So we've been having problems getting Zoey to sleep at night. Our routine has always been to take a shower, then have bedtime stories, then drink milk and sleep. Recently she's been resisting the entire process starting from the shower part.
Sometimes she tries to avoid it by making us read storybooks first. We used to have a 3 or 5 book a night rule. She now ignores the rule and just piles the books on the bed. Sort of like this.
Other nights like tonight, when we brought her into the bedroom for shower time at 10 pm, she decides to have a bed jumping dance party instead.
https://instagram.com/p/4_6b8OKiMQ/
It didn't help that her mommy became her accomplice.
https://instagram.com/p/5AAXQ7qiHl/
Eventually I managed to get her into the bathroom and take her shower. There was a lot of jumping, skipping, hopping and screaming involved, from both of us. I had thought after all the jumping on the bed before shower time, she would be tired out. How wrong I was.
Right now as I am typing this post, she is typing her own "blog post" while learning the alphabet on her Leap Frog laptop.
I know, it's almost midnight, most of your kids have probably been in bed for the past 3 or 4 hours. Unfortunately, we just happen to have a toddler who survives on very little sleep. We've tried getting her to sleep at 8 pm. This just results in her waking at 4 am and raiding the room while we try to continue sleeping. Sometimes its so bad that I am absolutely exhausted by the time I get up at 7 am. My sleep quality has been severely compromised because this toddler just refuses to sleep. We've tried to cut her nap times. In fact, she no longer takes a morning nap. She only does 1 nap a day and that's normally around 1 to 1.5 hours.
Some nights I lie in bed and fall asleep before she does. When I wake up, she's doing stuff like this.
So yeah, we have a toddler sleep problem and we are working hard on fixing it.
For starters, we are implementing an earlier wake up time. Since Zoey only goes to play group on Mon, Wed and Fri, she gets to sleep in on 4 other days of the week. We've decided that its a bad idea and she needs to start waking up between 7 am to 8 am every day. This will make it easier for her nap time to be shifted to 1 or 2 pm. This means that we can probably do shower time at 9 pm, bedtime by 10 pm.
I know that it is likely she stays awake til late because in recent weeks I've been coming home later, thus she hasn't been getting enough Mama time. I hope to change that by minimising nights out and trying to get home earlier on other days. Hopefully spending more time with her will stop her from feeling she needs to stay up to be with me.
In the meantime, if I look more zombified than usual, now you know why!