This is gonna be a looong post because I have a lot of back ground information to give, but in short: we can’t get our 2 year old to sleep anymore. It’s a fight every night, mostly ending in a 20 minute drive that knocks her out - but is there something else we can do???

Back story: we have our daughter on the weekends (her mom has her Monday-Thursday). She just turned two. She used to be the best sleeper, and I mean it! We would take her to her room and she would just point to the crib and knock right out... now? She’s crying every ten minutes and won’t wear herself out.

Her mom says bedtime is easy and that she likes her routine. But from what we understand, bed time at mom’s House is ridiculously late (like 11pm!!) and that’s just not possible for us. We’re really active on the weekends so our daughter is tired by 7pm but she refuses to sleep. It’s 10 pm right now and we’ve been trying since 8:30 to get her to stay in bed but it’s just not happening.

She takes a nap normally from 12-2:00 in the afternoon (she’ll fall asleep right where she stands without it). I guess the routine change is difficult going back and forth from mom to dad’s house but we can’t really change that...

Letting her cry it out won’t work because she’ll just scream for 10 minutes straight and that doesn’t feel right. Driving around for 20 minutes seems like a waste of gas every single night but it’s the only thing that works. Does anyone else have a sure-fire way to get their toddler to bed?

We have quiet time for an hour before bed, reading books or drinking a bottle (6oz milk), lullaby music...