18mo - Sleep Regression or Routine Flaw?

Our LO is 18mo and from 3mo to 17mo she slept through 90% of the time, always great. March has been a brutal month, though, and it’s really getting to me.

LO moved to 1 nap on 4 Feb 2025 at 16mo and Feb was a solid month of sleep, slept through 80% of the time.

As of today (21 March) she’s only slept through 6 times, and is routinely getting up somewhere between 2-4am. It can range from 30 mins to 2 hours; sometimes peaceful, sometimes on reads. Her nap quality is also far patchier, sometimes as little as an hour.

We don’t know what to do. Her schedule is basically 5.5/5.5 (latter when she actually falls asleep) as follows:

Wake-up - 7:30am Breakfast - 8:15am Lunch - 12noon Nap - 12:45pm Wake-up - 2:30pm (usually >1.5hrs and <2 hrs.) Dinner - 5:30pm Bedtime Snack - 6:30pm Bed - 7:30pm (asleep by 8pm)

An initial fix from an earlier blip was moving her nap later (used to be 12noon) and bed time earlier (was 7:45pm) which worked almost immediately. As March progressed, though, she’s slipped back. We’ve since tried tinkering her bed time closer to 7, closer to 8, but the trends stay the same.

At this point I don’t know if it’s simply regression or a routine problem. I’m embarrassed at how badly I’m failing to manager routine as I fake it so seriously and am scared she’ll never get back on track if I don’t get it right soon.

Notes:

  • She isn’t brilliant at self soothing back to sleep but is improving. She cannot fall asleep on her own, but sometimes will re settle to sleep on her own if she wakes (used to be never). We’ve contemplated trying harder to get her to go to sleep independently but candidly it has typically been an “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” thing as a typically solid sleeper.

Notes:

  • No medical conditions, developing well and in-like with her age.

  • She naps and sleeps in the dark with white noise. A nightlight hasn’t changed anything positively or negatively.

  • She loves cuddly toys but an introducing a lovey hasn’t changed anything positively or negatively.

  • Her molar teething has been brutal, was our original “diagnosis”. However it seems to have subsided this week and sleep hasn’t improved.

  • Thru/not thru always happens in stretches of days. It’s not sporadic. She didn’t sleep thru from March 1-5, then did 6-9, didn’t 10-12, did 13-15 and hasn’t since 16 (currently 21