The following was written back in Nov 2008. Got too much going on until now, when I found this missing post.
It has never been an easy task to get scratcher to sleep and stay asleep. "Fought" with him many times just to get him to sleep. At one time, it was the most stressful event of the day. He is < 24 months now yet he had only slept through the night a couple days ever since we brought him home from hospital. Thought that I was just being unlucky to brought back a lousy sleeper. Didn't know the underlying reason. When i was breastfeeding him, we thought he woke up in the middle of the night for feeding. Until I weaned him recently only I realized that it was eczema that kept him up during the night.
Being the primary care-taker, I am as sleep deprived as scratcher. On certain days, the night waking was worse than taking care of a newborn baby. After a long night, the result was a fussy and clingy toddler plus a cranky mommy. Whenever that happened, everything became a challenge, be it meal time, nap time, bath time etc. There were just too many episodes of me running out of the house due to stress of handling a crying toddler whom couldn't be soothed.
I kept telling myself it is time to change. All these unnecessary stress have had an unhealthy effect on both of us. He had seen me in tears so many times that he will say "mommy is happy, mommy is not crying". I felt a lot of guilt when I hear that each time. I tried to be strong but it was harder than anyone thought.
There are few things that we did to our bedroom to make scratcher more comfortable at night. We had a air purifier & recently added an osim humidifier in our air-conditioned room. Didn't notice significant improvement when the air purifier was introduced but with the humifier, Bryan seemed to scratch less during the night. The other thing is that I am sleeping with him now. Although we both are practically sharing a single mattress on the floor, I think I have better sleep than waking up, getting to him & climbing back to bed couple times a night. Also I gave him a lot of comfort to get him to sleep, like rubbing his back, scratching his leg and let him hold my hand or touch my back etc anything we can do to prevent a cranky clingy sleep deprived toddler.