mcswizzle

My daughter is 3 years old and currently fights naptime (when she doesn't manage to nap she usually turns into a monster around dinner time, 6p). She also doesn't sleep well at night, waking up almost every night around 1am and either keeping one or both of us up all night trying to get her back to sleep in her own bed, or relenting and having her sleep in our bed (both of which result in neither parent sleeping well).

My question is this: What can we do to exercise her and keep her both mentally and physically active to encourage sleep? We walked several miles yesterday with our dogs and she happily laid down for a nap (instead of fighting and throwing a fit not wanting to nap), but still did not stay asleep in her own bed last night.

It makes for hard days working from home when she has so much pent up energy, and doubly so when no one slept well the night before.

Our daycare ended up closing our location until things blow over, but did offer options that included a take-home curriculum. We're still waiting to receive that, but we're looking forward to it.

Last week was already going to be a bad week for me at work in terms of business, and doing it while balancing a toddler made things worse, so my wife has been bearing the brunt of the responsibility so far. I've tried to do what I can, walking the dogs more, cooking all the meals, helping with cleaning, dealing with grocery shopping and all that, but going into this week I'm hoping to be able to more actively help with watching our kid and giving her more grown up time.