I am sitting down to write this in the midst of an exhausted fog. Remember that fatigue from the newborn days, where you could feel the pressure of being tired behind your eyes and in a dull soreness at the base of your head? Where coffee only made you feel that odd combination of jittery and exhausted, and you saw the 3 a.m. hour come and go for many nights running?
I’m there again, and the only weird part is that I don’t have a newborn. My son is 19 months old and has (except for a night or two here and there) been sleeping wonderfully for well over a year now.
At first, I thought it was teething, but enough time has gone by without our old cures working, and it’s clear that that’s not our problem.
We’re square in the middle of (one month late!) an 18-month sleep regression.
I’ll start by saying I didn’t even know such a thing existed until I Googled something like “19-month-old baby is all of a sudden not sleeping and what is happening because I am going crazy” in desperation one night at 2 a.m. This is fairly common, which is surprising given that nobody warns you about it. There are a few theories as to why children just over a year and a half might go from sleeping beautifully to having troubled sleep.
The first is that growing and increased awareness of their surroundings leaves many toddlers at this age with a new fear of the dark. Experts suggest beginning to employ a nightlight at this time (we have always used one, so that hasn’t been a possibility for us).
The second is that there might be an uptick in separation anxiety around a year and a half, and babies of this age might just become more aware that they’re missing out on fun time with their families when they head off to dreamland. Other theories are that sleep regression at 18 months might be due to a growth spurt, 2-year molars coming in, or simple stubbornness and willfulness coming to life in the personalities of a growing toddler.
Whatever the reasons, many parents find themselves where they haven’t been in ages – working hard to settle their babies at the beginning of the night, up for hours in the middle of the night, and woken before sunrise to start the day. In many ways, this has been harder than previous times of sleep loss.
We’ve done a modified cry-it-out technique and are employing it again this time around. The last time I had to “train” him, though, he wasn’t as acutely aware of the fact that WE were leaving him in the room to cry and hadn’t yet started to call us by name.
If I thought listening to my baby cry at six months was hard, it was nothing compared to hearing him whimper and say “Mama? Mama? Maaamaa!!!” repeatedly. It’s also harder for the simple reason that he is bigger and stronger this time around. He climbs up the railings of his crib (and is precariously close to being able to climb out), his patented “arch the back and kick Mommy in the ribs” move packs more punch, and boy has he grown into a stubborn kid!
It’s a small comfort to know that other parents have experienced this and gotten through it. I try to remind myself (or sometimes my husband reminds me!) that I’ve gotten through periods of sleeplessness before. That said, we’re going on more than a week here, and we are all very, very tired.
