Posted by Sammy Jenkis on June 25, 2007 at 11:02:04:Long story short: Our 7 year old daughter will not sleep alone.
Long story: About 1 month ago, we started our daughter on solid foods (mostly rice cereal with one new food per week - peas, carrots, etc...). At 6 months we also started to put her down to bed at night differently. We used to rock her to sleep and then place her in her crib. We started to rock her until she showed signs of being drowsy, then we would put her in her crib so she could fall asleep on her own. The first few nights of doing that were very hard, but she got the hang of it and we had about 2 weeks of the best sleep she ever had (she would wake up a few times in the night, but was able to calm herself down and fall back asleep).
About 5 days ago, everything changed. During the two week "golden period", it would take about 15-20 minutes to put her down to sleep. 5 days ago, it took 2 hours, and she was crying so hard she threw up. Our process is once she's in the crib we walk away (stay in the room but out of her view). If she starts crying, we'll wait 5 minutes, and then go soothe her (we don't pick her up). Once asleep, she would wake up about once an hour screaming and it would take about 30 minutes or so to calm her back down to sleep. This continued the entire night.
We thought it might have been one of the new foods causing her digestive problems, so we just stuck with rice cereal. When that didn't help, we thought she might be teething, so we tried putting some oragel on her gums. That didn't help either. When she was having one of her crying fits, even carrying her around or rocking her didn't help.
After the 5th night of going through this, my wife and I were completely exhausted. At about midnight last night - at my wits end - I took our daughter and laid her in the bed with us. Within 2 minutes, she was asleep, and stayed that way the entire night!
At this point I am completely perplexed. She has been sleeping in her crib for the last 4 months or so, and was great for the first 2 weeks of going to sleep on her own. She doesn't seem to be teething yet, and she's been pretty good with the solid foods. She is great during the day - taking normal naps and not fussy at all - its just at night she freaks out. Is this just a phase or is something wrong with her? Its almost like she's afraid to be alone in her own room...