All of you who have kids who sleep the recommended amount, please be grateful and consider yourselves lucky.
And from this point, I don't care if you keep reading - but I'm documenting this so I remember what we did in case we need some kind of solution like this with future kid(s). So Holland was getting less than 12 total hours of sleep. And was fighting us a lot on going to bed (naps luckily, weren't really an issue, besides just being shorter). And taking away her toys/blankies as punishment for getting out of bed was not working anymore, neither was watching a short movie clip (like Toy Story or Megamind) on YouTube as a reward for getting jammies on and brushing her teeth good. So we tried a no-reaction technique - meaning we wouldn't scold her for getting out of bed, we'd just pick her up and lay her down w/o saying anything to her (the idea being that she liked the attention she was getting from getting out of bed, even if it was negative, so we would eliminate the reaction so she wouldn't get the attention and she'd stop doing it). The first night of this was bad, but we knew it would take some time. The second night was HORRIBLE. She literally got out of bed at least 50 times before I finally grabbed one of the child-proof door handles to place on her door so she couldn't get out. She only got 8 1/2 hours of sleep that night (because of course, she didn't sleep in at all the next day - she in no way makes up for lost sleep. We put her to bed at 8:30 and she spent the next 2 hours getting in and out of bed before actually falling asleep. Oh, and a child her age should be sleeping at least like 10 hours a night, just for a frame of reference. So yes, she was pretty grumpy the next day).
So, time for a new plan. She obviously turned the no-reaction technique into a game, which was not helping her get more sleep. So on to plan #351: a piggy bank. She gets a quarter in her (see-through) piggy back each night. If she gets out of bed, we take the quarter out and put the child-proof door handle back on. She also gets a quarter for staying in her room until 8AM (yes, we're bribing her to sleep in too). Same idea goes for naps. We've got a bag of quarters and it should take about 2 weeks or so to use up. When the bag is empty and the piggy bank (relatively) full, we take the "monies" (as she calls them) and head to Chuck E Cheese or the Nickel-cade or something. She always talks about how "monies are for the games" (thanks for an aunt and cousin for teaching that to her one time at Fuddruckers), so she is super excited to save up and go play games. Knock on wood - we've done this for 2 days, and it has worked amazingly well! She's actually getting more sleep! And she's back up to about 12 total hours of sleep (a child her age should be getting like 12-15 hours of sleep - just so you know we're not being unrealistic in bribing her to sleep for 12 hours...she's always been on the lower end of the recommended sleep amounts).
I know it's only been 2 days, but so far it has worked very well and to tie it all together, I think her finally sleeping again helped her wake up dry today! I know it's only been one time, and I don't know if she'll do it again tomorrow or not, but it makes me feel like I have some explanation for the lack of sleep lately. And look at how far we've come in a month and a half - just before Halloween, Holland was smearing poop all over the walls and we saw kind of a big regression in some of her behaviors (crawling, whining, chewing on everything - in a lot of ways it was like she had regressed a full years worth). Today she woke up dry! Considering that she's only 2 1/2, I really don't care if she's night-time potty trained yet, but I'm so happy for her that she's hit that milestone (at least once)! And hopefully we'll be headed to Chuck E Cheese in a couple of weeks :)
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