3 Answers
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Some kids are great sleepers and others are not. I was blessed with 1 great sleeper and 2 terrible sleepers. They do outgrow it - eventually.
I don't go into their rooms when they wake up, unless they're crying. I keep a sippy of water near my 2-year old's crib - he can reach it and he'll wake up, drink a bit, and then go back to sleep. If they're crying, I go to them, talk to them, rub their backs or tummies, but I don't pick them up.
I also let them go to sleep by themselves at bedtime. We have a story time and then they go into their beds (or crib) and usually talk themselves to sleep. But they all know how to self-soothe and fall back asleep. If your son has someone with him till he falls asleep, that might make night wakings hard for him to handle.
Regardless, it does get better in time.
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It sounds like your son is fine with the wakings and the falling back asleep, if I understand correctly, and that the problem is that you're then up UP for longer than you want to be. That sucks! I had the same problem. I sleep more lightly now, since becoming a mom, and wake up thinking I hear something, and then strain to hear it some more often because I think I'm going to need to get up in a moment or two, and then it doesn't come back, and by then I'm up.
I tried a couple of things for the me-falling-back-asleep problem:
- we steadily moved the baby monitor speakers further away, and turned them down lower and lower, and then got rid of them entirely - figuring we (really, me) didn't need to wake up for each painless awakening. It was hard for us to give them up (honestly, it took them breaking!) because our 1 year old sleeps pretty far away, but we consoled ourselves by the memory of how loud she can be when she wants to, and began sleeping better once they were gone.
- staying in bed, taking a few deep breaths and trying to enjoy the fact that I'm getting to lay in bed and don't need to get up :)
- doing some yoga/stretching/meditating on the floor in my room (studies show that gentle stretching before bed results in better sleep)
- got a, believe it or not, pillow speaker to plug into my clock radio and tuck under the pillow, so I can fall asleep to music or talk radio without bothering my husband. Got to always turn on the radio's sleep timer though, or the rest of my sleep ends up disrupted.
Hope something in there helps. Being awake while the baby's asleep is so unfortunate, I know!
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This has been a problem for me, too...luckily our son has been waking up at night less frequently (he is over 2) so in that sense it is getting better. I wish I had some good tricks to help you get back to sleep, but I find that once I am fully awake it often takes me a few hours to settle back to sleep again :(
What did/does help is designating some nights as "off duty" for me, and having my husband go in and deal with my son if he needs to be tended to during the night. I still hear it when he wakes up, but if my husband goes in fast enough I can usually get back to sleep OK. It's important that I not awaken fully, and critical that I not get out of bed. Seems once that happens I'm in for two hours of sleep lost.
I hope you find something helpful for you. There are lots of good suggestions in the other post...I may try one or two of those myself! It's a really annoying situation to be in.
