Mk13, the sleep situation sounds terribly frustrating!! FWIW, our ds never slept more than 5 hours per night until he was in first grade and school finally started tiring him out. I have so many memories of him staying up until almost midnight then pouncing on dh and I at 5 in the morning letting us know "It's time to get up! It's time to get up!". He also didn't sleep in his bed - he usually crawled out of his bedroom and played in the hall until he fell asleep. The difference with him was he wasn't noisy - he has always been a kid who listens and observes rather than an active jumping up and down running all over kid. One thing ds was doing while he was wide awake late at night was listening to our tv downstairs - he could hear it up in his room. We had no idea he could hear it at first, until one week when dh had been away on business and I replayed an episode of one of our favorite tv shows for ds when he returned.... as a commercial came on dh mused "I wonder what happens next?" and from upstairs ds called out and told him exactly what was going to happen next (because he'd been listening when I watched it the previous week!).
I tried thinking about the sleep stuff a little bit, and one thing about our ds - he did start sleeping longer at night once he was in elementary school, but he was still a very light sleeper and he always wakes up in the middle of the night (our younger dd does too). Both ds and our younger dd are kids who worry a lot - that's there way of dealing with stress. Hindsight is all I have to guess with but I wonder in retrospect if perhaps part of the early childhood lack of sleep was related to anxiety also. Not sure! And at the time I was *way* too tired to have figured it out if it was
I understand about the preschool and the kids you know - I wonder though if they act the same way or the issues would be the same when they are in a school with close supervision and different expectations than at home.
