A real story of how I successfully sleep-trained my little one
How do you sleep train a toddler? Is it even possible? Are your evenings a misery? Do you dread bedtime? Does your little one’s evening routine take 4 hours? Do you wish you could, once in a while, have dinner at the same time as your other half? And, more to the point for this story, have you missed the sleep-training train when your little one was a baby?
Hey tired parents and fellow sleep-deprived warriors! If you’ve ever found yourself bargaining with a toddler over bedtime snacks or doing the 3 AM shift trying to soothe a mini insomniac, you’re in good company. Welcome to my sleep-deprived saga – a six-month long rollercoaster of toddler sleep training, filled with the kind of exhaustion that makes you question your life choices.
Those were six months that brought lots of changes in all our lives, the biggest one being the arrival of our second baby.
Buckle up, grab a coffee and join me. I have spent 2 years bouncing on a pilates ball, I have developed night vision, I’ve damaged several muscles and I’m finally coming out on the other side.
Oooh what does the other side look like?
Disclosure:
I am still extremely sleep-deprived and the youngest one’s sleep pattern is by no means perfect. So let me manage your expectations from this post by explaining what I mean by ‘coming out on the other side’:
- Chris and I have dinner together, at a reasonable time, always.
- If we’re that way inclined, we can now watch entire films, not just tv episodes (wow).
- We do not sleep in the same bed as Sophia, ever.
- We sleep for up to 4 uninterrupted hours and up to 6.5 hours in total at night.
The need for change
Upon sharing our last year with her, our health visitor looked at us with a mix of sympathy and a dash of “bless your exhausted souls” and she referred us to a sleep nurse.
Hello Becca, we said with hearts full of hope: Do you know how to sleep train a toddler? Becca obviously pointed out the importance of quality sleep for a toddler’s growth and development. Yeah yeah yeah we said, we know all that. But at that point, getting her to sleep was not the main reason we asked for help: we needed to sleep. Sleep training for her growth, sure, but let’s not forget the subtle personal agenda.
A consistent routine – if only it were that easy
As everyone will tell you, a soothing and predictable bedtime routine is your first step to good sleep habits. As first-time parents we read up a lot on the matter and always took advice from trusted sources. Our bedtime routine has always included bath / wash, dimmed red light, low volume boring instrumental lullabies / white noise, warm formula / milk, brushing (once it became relevant), goodnight stories. We have always been religious about it, almost since birth. And a lot of good that did us.
All you bleary-eyed new parents out there who’ve meticulously crafted the perfect bedtime routine only to be bitterly disappointed night after night – welcome to the club. It’s not you – it’s the baby sleep mystery we’re all trying to crack.
Our story of finally, sort-of, sleep training our toddler
So, back in April we wondered, not hoping for much, can you really sleep train a toddler? Has that ship sailed? Have we missed that sweet 5-9 month window when babies learn to self-soothe without being scarred for life?
Spoiler alert – yes we have. Sophia is 21 months old. Our precious first born has enjoyed a lifetime of contact naps and co-sleeping at request. We have to rock the heck out of her before she drifts off. Her habits are cemented, she knows what she likes and what she doesn’t and she now has the words to let us know. But with a new sibling arriving very soon it is now or never.
A real account of our toddler’s sleep transitions over six months
APRIL
Sophia: 21 months
Mama: 7 months pregnant
- Sophia officially sleeps in a travel cot on the foot of our bed.
- Her room is ‘2 days away from being ready’ according to Chris.
- Nap time can take 30 minutes, bedtime can take up to 90 minutes.
- Chris’ back is buggered from intensive DIY and mine is trying to support a seven month bump. As a result, lowering a toddler gently into the travel cot has been challenging. Admittedly transfer has not been as smooth as we’d like during this month.
- Sophia wakes up screaming 50% of the time during touchdown so the whole process has to be repeated.
- Once finally down, she will wake up screaming EXACTLY 45 minutes later. Our sleep nurse says it’s a documented, well known thing with the terrifying name of ’45 minute intruder’. Somehow knowing this doesn’t help. Back on the pilates ball for more rocking.
- After all the rocking, all the intruders and all other nonsense, it is already close to 10pm which only gives us an hour of no-kids time – at most.
- She still requests milk at night -gasp- usually around 2.30 am but sometimes as early as 1am. This means I have to go downstairs, grab the bottle from the fridge and heat it on the bottle heater at my bedside table while Sophia screams at me.
- Like Sadako from the Ring crawling out of the TV, she emerges from the travel cot and creeps into our bed at around 4am.
- She’s up for the day at 6am on a good day, 5 is acceptable, 4.30 not unheard of. It takes a lot of self-restraint not to use the f-word. Chris suggests saying fudge instead. I start the day faux-cursing and craving sugar.
- I regularly look up ‘can you die from lack of sleep’ on Google.
MAY
Sophia: 22 months
Mama: 8 months pregnant
- Sophia’s room is ready(ish)! She takes her first nap on the bottom bunk to test the waters.
- The experiment is successful and so she officially moves into her own room.
- She still needs to be held and rocked to drift off. This can take up to one hour at nights.
- She will still wake up between 2-3am, so we alternate nights taking milk to her.
- 9/10 times it’s impossible to sneak back out without her kicking off, so one of us sleeps there for the rest of the night.
- Even though we’re 100% certain she doesn’t need milk at 3am, a mini fridge is purchased for our bedroom at that point. Nights were hard enough without going up and down the stairs.
JUNE
Sophia: 23 months
Mama: a few days postpartum
- Baby Maya has arrived.
- Sophia is getting so big. I remember the last time I held her to sleep in late May. She naturally slipped through my arms and into bed – she still needed my hand on her back though.
- Chris and I strictly alternate evenings reading to her and putting her down.
- We have to be quiet as a ninja when leaving the room because she is super aware of any little noise, even in her sleep. There are 3 creaky floorboards and the door makes a grating noise as it drags across the carpet. I then decide to hide her Yoto player among her books and set some white noise on low volume, gradually turning it up from my phone after I leave the room.
- Only Chris goes in to her when she wakes up at night, as I am breastfeeding Maya. He doesn’t always manage to sneak out without Sophia kicking off, so most nights he ends up staying there until morning.
JULY
Sophia: 2 years old
Mama: 1 month postpartum
- Sophia turns 2!
- Nap times are much easier. The good weather helps as she’s bouncing around in the garden all day.
- My energy levels are at an all time low. Sometimes the darkness, white noise and my repetitive chanting while putting Sophia down for her nap make me fall asleep too.
- Her bedroom door is planed and sanded so it doesn’t brush against the carpet. The 3 offending floorboards are nailed into place.
- She still wakes up at 3 or 4am. Chris goes in with milk.
- Despite never – ever getting dark in Edinburgh in July, we decide to bring her bedtime forward with the ultimate goal of her sleeping 7.30pm – 7.30am.
- Miraculously, this actually happens a few times in the second half of July – She sleeps through!
- As we long suspected, little shiitake mushroom does not actually need milk at night. That’s a big step forward for both her sleep habits and her tooth hygiene. Time to push for further changes.
AUGUST
Sophia: 2 years 1 month
Maya: 2 months
- Putting Sophia down at night still takes an eternity.
- Breakthrough: Night time bottle officially stops. However, munchkin still wakes up at 3 out of habit, and “reads”. What are we to do? Which brings me to
- Breakthrough #2: Chris will not go in the room to put her back to sleep any more. Instead he presses the ‘talk’ button on the baby monitor and commands: “LIE DOWN MUNCHKIN!” Books fly towards the camera as she quickly gets back under the covers. In the beginning it was challenging to resist responding in person, especially for me. However, we found that the chat through the baby camera was enough of a reassurance for her.
- This was the biggest game changer, and what cemented the principle that at nights, we stay in our own bed, and she stays at hers. In my opinion this worked because Sophia was not sleeping in a crib. If something woke her in the middle of the night she had the freedom to get up herself – she didn’t need us to pick her up. In addition, she had to make the conscious decision to listen to us and go back to bed of her own free will. I was and still am amazed about the fact she has very rarely, to this day, abused that freedom.
- She has started to figure out how to turn a knob so a baby gate is installed outside her bedroom door.
SEPTEMBER
Sophia: 2 years 2 months
Maya: 3 months
- Breakthrough: In the spirit of the independence we encouraged in August, we no longer place a hand on her back waiting for her to drift off. Instead, we sit next to the bed. The goal is to gradually move further away. If she fidgets or lifts her head up like a cobra, we gently push her back down and move away again.
- Despite all the progress we made over the summer, the bedtime routine has not gotten any shorter. Our family statistical analysis reveals Chris has better luck than me getting the job done in under an hour. Well, feel free to take over permanently, I suggest, but he passes.
- Breakthrough#2: One rainy September evening, it was Chris’ turn to deal with munchkin, so I started dinner. Just when I was thinking of clever ways to keep the food hot for 90 minutes, Chris appeared in the kitchen and said: “Sod it, I’m hungry”. This is what it took to take the plunge – frustration and hunger. And this was the first time one of us left the room with Sophia still awake. This was uncharted territory. What do we do, I thought. Do we go back? Do we sit down to eat as normal? Surprisingly, after an initial whinge, Sophia got quiet. So we ate, checking the monitor constantly and reminding her to lie down if she wasn’t, until she eventually drifted off. Fudging unbelievable.
- As Sophia would take ages to actually fall asleep, and after the above precedent, we make the pact of leaving the room after 45 minutes (pyjamas and books all included) whether she’s down or not, with the intention of gradually reducing the time. Sophia’s reactions when we walk out the door range from a total meltdown to mild annoyance. She tends to cry more when I make my exit compared to when Chris does, so we’ve developed a tag-team strategy. Sometimes, we’ll spontaneously switch duties, allowing me to slip out of the room. Leaving her door slightly open, with a bit of hallway light and background noise, surprisingly works wonders. We then watch her from the monitor as she eventually drifts off.
- When telling this story to friends I get asked, but if she’s not in a crib and on her own does she not wander in the room? No she actually doesn’t. The room is dark apart from a small red light inside the bottom bunk, which probably helps.
- The quality of her sleep overnight is still not great. She wakes up at the slightest noise. I hide her Yoto player behind a frame on a tall shelf, and adjust the white noise volume from my phone. This helps us tremendously, otherwise going up the down the stairs, using the toilet or feeding and settling Maya at night are all things that can set her off.
OCTOBER
Sophia: 2 years 3 months
Maya: 4 months
- At this stage, we only stay for a little while after books, then kiss her goodnight and leave her at it.
- Sophia is obviously much more used to the idea that she will put herself to sleep. It sometimes feels like she’s waiting for us to leave before she can let herself sleep.
- More often than not she is fine with me leaving the room.
- We can use the toilet at night, no problem. Somehow she’s more secure to the idea that we might be around making some noise – but it’s still night time and she should be sleeping. I wish it was that simple when I was 8 months pregnant and needed the toilet every half an hour.
- We now get some brilliant nights, some OK nights, and the occasional bad one due to her waking up a for a little ‘reading’ session.
- Despite things not being perfect (and they probably never will) the actual bedtime routine has completely transformed over the last six months.
Celebrating small victories
…Is something that we did not do. We never really celebrated the small wins in our sleep training adventure. Every night, we’d exchange these exhausted looks, both thinking, “Well, that was rough.” And truth be told, it was. Each night felt like a déjà vu of the previous one. What we didn’t catch onto in our sleep-deprived haze and constant irritability was that, hey, it wasn’t as tough as last week or the month before. We were too tangled up in the struggle to notice the progress we were actually making.
What I would tell my complaining self in October is: Oooh really, did you spend half an hour on the carpet in the dark? Well, before that it was one whole hour. Before that it was an hour at bedtime and 4 hours of co-sleeping in a single bed with a fidgety toddler and a huge pregnant belly. And before that it was holding and rocking a 32 pound toddler for hours. How does that half hour on the carpet sound now?
So, for all you parents in the midst of figuring out how to sleep train a toddler: Mark any milestones, no matter how little. Do a little dance, open some celebratory Prosecco, or Toblerone, and give yourselves a pat on the back. You’re doing better than you think.
Final thoughts
I can never be certain if our efforts gradually paid off, or Sophia was more ready for changes, or a combination of the two. The important thing is she started sleeping through the night more consistently, waking up well-rested and in a better mood. On top of that, the bedtime routine is now an actually pleasant part of our day. Thinking back to how distressed she was at bedtime six months back, I am so grateful.
This whole sleep training gig – it’s like navigating a parenting maze where everyone’s got an opinion. Some say a nighttime bottle at age two is a no-no, others side-eye the idea of a toddler in a big bed, and then there are those parents who act like a toddler sleeping through the night is as easy as flipping a switch.
Reality check: every kid is the captain of their own sleep ship. Shoutout to the sleep nurse we consulted – her advice was gold, but let’s be real, trying to stick to it word for word? Nearly impossible. What I’ve figured out is, there’s no universal manual for this stuff. It’s all about finding the sweet spot that works for you and your little ones and figuring out a sleep routine that doesn’t make you want to pull your hair out.
So, here’s to embracing the unpredictable and finding what clicks for your crew.
PS. How many years has it been since YOU slept through the night?
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