Bedtime solidarity

My son was a sleeping dream. He slept through the night early on and did bedtime so well. He never climbed out of his crib, didn’t learn he could get out of his bed until 3 (even though he was in a toddler bed) and didn’t actually leave his room until several months into 3. I was that annoying parent.Until my kid got his tonsils out. After that it’s all gone to hell. Not sure if it’s because of the two weeks of waking him to give pain medicine or that he is sleeping better and getting more quality sleep so it less tired? Maybe it was just time for him to hit a stage? He had slightly began stalling before this.He has now become so frustrating at bedtime I find myself constantly dreading bed time as I’ve heard many parents say. He needs one more kiss or one more hug or a bandaid or water or something else before we can leave. When we do leave he calls us back in for listed reasons or because he “can’t find his teddy” or “he needs to be pushed back from the edge.”We’ve tried letting him know we won’t be back once we leave and making sure he has gotten everything “he needs” before we leave. We then will attempt to not respond to his calls but are met with tears and typically that leads to eventually leaving the bedroom if we try to ignore him. When we put him back we can’t leave without tears happening. He gets so desperate he will do anything to keep us in there or get us to stay. On top of that we are very big in expression of feelings (I harp on this because I’m not great at it) so we get a lot of “you didn’t do respond when I called and it made me sad,” or “you yelled at me and I don’t like that,” when we talk sternly about going back to bed (it is NOT a yell). Which makes my empathetic heart feel like shit even though I’m certain he’s just a manipulative genius.I feel as though I’m hardly looking for advice because I’ve read the entire internet over this, but more so solidarity. If you have an anecdotal “they outgrow this” I would love to hear it 🤣 via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/3b1fu21