Question: For at least a year, but with increasing regularity, my daughter has started yelling/crying/calling out between about 11:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. She has a fairly regular bedtime routine, and still takes a nap during the afternoon. In fact, on days when she doesn’t take a good nap or only gets a car nap, it’s more likely that she’ll have disrupted sleep. When she takes a nice long nap in the afternoon, she’s more likely to sleep through the night peacefully.
There doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about this. When I step into her doorway and say something to her, she becomes quiet, but it typically starts up again within 10 minutes. Lately it’s been really frustrating for me because I know she can’t help it, but it’s rare that I get a good night’s sleep. Either she starts making noise just as I’m drifting off, making it hard for me to get back to that drifting-off point, or she wakes me up from a sound sleep and I find it difficult to go back to sleep, especially if she cries intermittently over the course of an hour.When I have slept in the same bed with her (at my parents’ house, for example), I’ve noticed that she always tenses up before she starts making noise. I feel that it must be a neurological thing, but I hope she’ll grow out of it soon. Any advice or knowledge you can share would be greatly appreciated.