Bedtime Woes

Doesn't this just break your heart? It does mine!

For those of you on Facebook, you already know the problems we are having with Colten and his sleeping habits...or shall I say, the lack thereof! For the longest time, he would nurse to sleep or we'd hold him for all of 5 minutes and he'd be asleep and we'd put him in his crib. Overtime, the time it took him to get to sleep got longer and longer. Now that he's all over the place, he fights sleep like mad! We can't hold him to sleep...he fights to sit up and crawl off. When he does lay there it could take hours (not that we tried...we just don't think that's the way to go about this). He has gone from sleeping through the night to getting up again...sometimes twice a night.

Even when he's nursing while he's tired, he fights it. He'll be drowsy and all of a sudden he sits up (with me spraying everywhere) so he won't fall asleep. He then tries to nurse sitting up. I mean, how in the world does he think he doesn't need to sleep?

We have a sound machine for white noise. We use a soft blanket that he loves. His room is as dark as can be without living in a basement and he still hates going to sleep on his own. Here's what we have been doing as of lately: We put him to bed tired, and he immediately starts crying, rolls over and stands up and starts screaming before we can even get out the door. We close the door and wait. 5 minutes later or more, we go in there, lay him down and give him the pacifer and go back out. He's usually standing up again, screaming, before we can exit the room. This goes on like this until he finally rolls over and softly cries himself to sleep. It can last anywhere from an hour to the longest at 2 hours. A lot of the time we wait more than the 5 minutes, but if his screams change, we check on him. We don't really time it since we try to work on something while we wait so we don't just sit there on edge.

We are trying to catch him tired BEFORE he's OVERTIRED. This is hard because he can go from happy baby all over the place to a grump sitting in the middle of the floor crying in 2 seconds.

We've tried putting him to bed around 8pm since Austin goes to bed at 7:30 and he can sleep through a freight train. It still takes him FOREVER to go to bed.

Tried putting him to bed at 6:30 and 7:00. He's definitely tired at that time, but again, it takes him forever to fall asleep and he's screaming the whole time. We HAVE to either get him asleep by 7:30 or move him to the pack n play so that Austin can go to sleep (they share a bedroom).

Naps are supposed to be crucial to good bedtime habits. His naps are only getting worse. He wakes up too early and so his first nap is really early as well. They are all over the place depending on what time he got up and how cranky he is.

There was ONE glorious day where both boys woke up a little after 7am. Colten got to take a nap at 9am for 1.5 hours, 12:30pm for 1.5 hours and then a short 30 minute nap around 3pm. He was asleep by 7pm and slept until 6:30am without waking. I think the fact that he had such good naps and had good sleep did this, but for the life of me, I cannot get him to stay on this schedule! He was so happy all day long and didn't fuss very much at all.

Everyday other than that day, he is happy for about an hour, then is cranky until I finally make him take a nap. He wants to be held, but he fights to be held. He fusses and cries and won't play with anything. This is all so different since Austin has almost always been a good sleeper.

Any suggestions?