Spreading the word – Sleep cycle challenge at 13 months

Madeline has always been a great sleeper (thanks in part to Babywise). Although we “trained” her to sleep through the night early on, I never knew that the training was ongoing! I thought that once it was accomplished, that was it. But oh no…I was mistaken. As I’ve said before, there are times when they reach a milestone (or are about to) and their sleep goes from perfect and content to a complete nightmare. The older she gets, the more I doubt myself. When she was an infant, I knew she was up for one of 4 reasons: she was hungry, she was in pain, she was sick, or she needed changed (although she never really seemed to care about this). Now, I find myself wondering if she is screaming because she’s scared, afraid of the dark, having a nightmare, teething, getting an ear infection, having separation anxiety, etc…ah! Before I go on, I just want to say that this is totally normal – the 13 month mark seems to be another milestone where sleep is challenged!
BabyCenter blog
Yahoo Q&A

Every night, we put her to bed at 7/7:30 and up until 2 nights ago, she went down like a champ – sometimes she’d even walk over to the crib, grab the rails, and cry to go in. But the last two nights she screams for a few minutes when we put her in and then both nights, on the nose, she wakes up screaming at 8:00 until we go up and get her. The first night we brought her downstairs (I thought maybe we’d put her to bed too early) and she played for 30 minutes and went back to bed (still cried for 5 minutes but eventually went back to sleep). Last night, when she woke up screaming, we let her cry for almost 30 minutes before getting her (only because I heard a loud thud and thought she’d fallen out of bed) but I didnt’ leave the room – I just comforted her and turned on a nightlight before placing her back in bed. She screamed for another 10 minutes and went back to bed. Now, instead of this just being a bedtime problem, it’s turning into a nighttime problem. She wakes up every few hours and screams for 10 – 20 minutes. I look at her on the monitor and she’s walking around her crib or standing by the door side of the crib screaming. I never get her at night, so I’m hoping this stops tonight. It’s just incredibly frustrating not to know what the problem is! I wish I could look at a book and get the answer. So far all I’ve found is a lot of proof that this is totally normal and that basically we need to “retrain” her to sleep.

Today, I’m going to try to put her to bed later (@8) and see if hat helps. I’ll let you know! Maybe she’s getting too much sleep during the day and I should cut her back to one nap? Please don’t say it’s so! I love the 2 nap day! Wish us luck!