Her bedtime of 8pm is right out the window right now. Though she's regularly waking up at 7am and has completely removed her morning nap, she's nowhere near tired enough to put down at 8.
That said, putting her down at 9 sure isn't easy. In fact, it's often been an hour and a half long task.
Here's the procedure in a nutshell:
- Calm her down. Usually with her regular bedtime routine, change, stories, songs, cuddles.
- Put her in bed. Lights out. This is often accompanied with much protestation.
- If step 2 goes badly enough, climb in bed with her.
- Watch Rebecca scramble over you repeatedly, and make her way to her closed bedroom door, blanket in tow, for a full on baby meltdown.
- Repeat steps 1-3 until she stays in bed.
- Get out of bed if you're in it. Continue to settle her through song and soothing words while edging towards the door. By this point she should be nodding off.
- Open the door.
- Stand in the door making intermittent soothing noises every time she stirs.
- Slowly close the door, making sure she's not waking up.
- Gently latch the door.
- Repeat steps 1-10 as necessary, as the latch noise of the door is apparently hard wired as a signal in Rebecca's brain to initiate a full on hissy fit where she jumps out of bed, runs to the door and pounds on it screaming bloody murder.
Naptime hasn't been as bad, I put her in bed, tell her it's naptime and that I love her, and exit the room latching the door. If she puts up a little fuss and walks over to the door, I let her settle herself which she usually does in a couple minutes.
This ends all too frequently in this:
Yeah, sleep is tiring. Or rather, getting Rebecca to sleep. Ah well.
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