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[quote=Anonymous]Looking for some advice on how to successfully have our 3 year old share a room with our 8 month old. We have had them separated until now first with the baby in our room, then in separate bedrooms in a vacation home for the summer, and the transition is not going well now that they have to be roommates.

For context, we sleep trained our first at 3.5 months old and it took 3 nights and we never really thought about it again. With our second we did the same process, and despite best efforts and tweaking the schedule, the baby will not sleep consistently past the early morning. We had them separated all summer into separate bedrooms and the baby would wake up at 5:30 every day despite black out blinds and a noise machine. We wouldn’t go in until 6:30am to start the day and he’d play the whole hour without falling back asleep. We tried feeding him initially at that 5:30am wake up at the beginning of the summer after we had sleep trained thinking he might be hungry, but he never would go back down after a feed.

Since we sleep trained him at 3.5 months, he’s been on two naps—one around 9am, and a second around 1:30. He’s always fallen asleep independently and happily. The naps usually last between 1-2 hours each for a total daily sleep time of 3-3.5 hours.

At night, he usually sleeps for a 10 hour stretch and we have trouble getting him to stay awake much beyond 8pm. Our oldest had no problem staying awake later and sleeping in later if needed even though the overnight sleep stretch was always 11.5 hours, but the baby seems to have a 7:30pm alarm set where he wants to go down immediately. When we stretch him until 8:30, it doesn’t make the morning wake up any later.

We live in the city and only have two bedrooms, so there’s no other option right now. They have to share until we can afford a bigger place in a year or so. We’ve been putting them down together at night and they go to sleep fine, but then 5/5:30am rolls around and the baby wakes up. We tried to leave him but he wakes up the 3 year old and everyone is miserable.

This week we tried bringing the 3 year old into our bed when the baby woke up, but he didn’t sleep because we’ve never coslept and frankly I don’t think he knows how. I tried the same with bringing the baby into our bed, but he was wide awake. I even tried feeding the baby at 5am today and putting him back down in desperation but he was wide awake and woke up the 3 year old.

Do we just have to grit our teeth and give it time and deal with a very cranky, sleep deprived 3 year old until the baby somehow figures it out, or is there some magic bullet I’m missing here? Sleep training worked so well when there was just one kid, and this feels much more challenging. [/quote]

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