[navbaker]

My experience has been close to yours. The wife and I have a 3 and 5 year old. We did tons of research into different methods of sleep training methods and arrived at practical ways to make sure they understood that bedtime meant staying in their room and in their own beds, even if they weren't necessarily sleepy yet.

The 5 year old is in his "big boy bed" and we use a color-changing nightlight on a timer that is a soft red when he needs to stay in his room and turns blue when he can come out. The 3 year old is still in his crib for another few weeks, then we will transition him to the same setup.

Apart from the predictable times here and there where the older one sneaks out of bed to see what we're up to, it's worked out really well and gives us our sanity back from around 745pm to whenever we go to bed.