Go the heck to SLEEP!

I wrote the majority of this post (the part in italics) the day after Christmas....

If any of you have listened to the book as read by Samuel Jackson with a similar title to my post title, you already have a pretty good idea where I'm going with this post (it has language though so don't bother googling it, if that will offend you)...

Why is it that kids can come up with every excuse and reason to never fall asleep, and yet I can barely stay awake while praying my rosary or reading my Bible? It's totally unfair. In a post sometime back in November I mentioned that we were having some issues with Kayla at bedtime. Up until about age 29 months (that's almost 2 1/2 years) she has been a great sleeper. We had our bedtime routine and she was a champ at falling asleep within 20 minutes or so. Usually she'd read herself a few books during that 20 minutes and then drop right off to sleep.

Well that all changed for no apparent reason a couple months ago. Suddenly we have to go potty 16 times, put diaper cream on, give hugs and kisses (as if we haven't done it 5 times already), pick out a few new books to look at from the bookshelf in the living room, turn on all the lights and climb into the closet, arrange our stuffed animals 6 different ways on the bed, "visit" Elise and read books to her, get a drink, sing another song (oh yes, we've done that 15 times already, too), pull our pajama pants off and rip off our diaper and then need it to be put back on, and I'm guessing you get my point by now....

A little side note: It doesn't matter what time we put her to sleep either. Her bedtime had always been about 8:30pm so we thought maybe we needed to make it earlier since she seems to need about an hour and a half to wind down in the evenings now. Nope. We put her to bed at 7:30 and she will still stay up until close to 10pm. Of course if we put her to bed at 10pm, it usually only takes about 20 minutes for her to wind down, but that's not what we're going for.

So I began looking up stuff on the internet to see what other people do when their children won't go to sleep in a reasonable amount of time. We started taking away her baby and blanky for 5-10 minutes at a time, which helped a little, but didn't really solve the problem. I made up a bedtime chart with pictures of all the things we do before bed: brushing teeth, going potty, saying prayers, reading books, singing songs, putting on pajamas, saying goodnight to our fish etc. I made a little box next to each picture and slipped the pictures into a plastic protector. After she completes each task, she uses a dry erase marker to color in the box next to the appropriate picture. When all the boxes are colored in, it is bedtime. She loves the process, but it doesn't seem to help her wind down any faster. :(

For Christmas we got Elise a cd player because Kayla always enjoyed listening to music while she fell asleep at that age. I had heard other people using the tactic of telling your child that he/she has until the music stops to fall asleep. Again, Kayla enjoys the music, but it hasn't really helped speed up the falling asleep process.

I have also tried moving her naptime up so that she will be tired earlier and thus fall alseep faster. No dice. It then becomes the same process AND during naptime, and sometimes because it's not dark in her room during the day, she never goes to sleep because she's too busy reading and playing with her dolls in bed. If she has no nap at all, it sometimes cuts a half hour off the winding down time at night, but it's not a significant amount of time to justify cutting her nap out completely. When I put her down at 1:30pm for a nap, she generally plays and reads until about 2pm, falls asleep, and sleeps for 1-2 hours depending on what activities we did in the morning. 1-2 hours versus going to sleep half an hour earlier at night is not a fair trade. So we are back at square one wondering how to get Kayla to fall asleep a little faster at night.

I have basically given up. I let her keep the nightlight on and read until she eventually falls asleep. The battle has switched from trying to get her to fall asleep faster to trying to just keep her quiet in her room for the 1 1/2 -2 hours that it takes her to wind down and fall asleep.

One point I forgot to mention is that during all this time that Kayla is doing her thing, Elise has a sort of routine too. Her routine is to play with her sister for about the first 20 minutes and then fall asleep. Generally she gets woken up about an hour later when Kayla is nearing the end of her long fight to stay awake. Elise starts crying, still half-asleep, and continues for about 20-30 minutes during which Kayla FINALLY falls to sleep.

And a month later from the original post, she is still taking forever to wind down, will not even stay in her room and read quietly (which she LOVES to do at any other time of the day for hours on end). The ONLY nice part is that she does sleep until about 8 or 9am when she does this.

So.......WHAT AM I DOING WRONG? What have you other moms tried? She's not being bad per se (except the fact that she is not obeying our orders to go to sleep); she just seems to need a really long time to wind down in the evening. She's always very sweet and really comes up with some pretty creative and valid excuses to be getting out of bed a million times, but it's just not acceptable. HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!