Hi ladies,
Sorry for the long post!
I am a FTM and I have a phenomenal 8m old boy (9 at the end of the month)!
BACKSTORY:
Baby boy in his own nursery and has been for a while now. We did sleep training at about 6m (Taking Cara Babies - Ferber but "gentler") as he was waking every hour, feeding twice a night and I was falling apart as my husband was working nights at the time! It did “work” but it hasn’t in the long run and now I look back I don’t know how we did it 💔 and I will not/cannot do it again!
Current situation:
- 8m sleep regression is KICKING MY ASS!
- Bub is teething. He has both front top and bottom just poking through and His top left fangs are trying to come through now
- He is JUST about to crawl - up on his haunches/rocks forward/bum shuffles
- Bub is pretty reliant on the dummy. He needs it to fall asleep and certainly for naps he wakes up when he reaches the end of a sleep cycle and it’s been spat out. That being said he does between 45-90m naps 2 x a day.
- we've practiced lots of dummy’s in the cot but not very regularly because we have/have had his hands covered since birth for sleep. He had really bad facial eczema when he was little and now it’s cleared up it’s just a habit but times we’ve had his hands uncovered he gets really distracted! Picks at his mattress or cot, fiddles with the dummy, flings his lovey/comforter around and doesn’t settle
- bed is between 6-7pm depending on last nap and we were doing a dream feed at 11pm but are stopping that because it made no difference to how long/well he slept and his day milk intake is good
- he wakes up on average 2 x a night from about 12am - sometimes more - and on a really bad night every hour from about 12am. Normally it’s just a case of a quick dummy plug and he’s back down
- occasionally he’s needed a bounce to get back to sleep and being put back down in his cot with the tentativeness of an active Grenade
- he usually sleeps 11.5-12 (broken) hours and is never up properly before 6am
- he has a white noise machine and a lovely for sleep as well as the dummy
- We do a full bedtime routine for naps and night sleep
- WW are 3-3.30 hours depending on how exhausted he is
Basically this is a very long winded way of asking for any advice or tips on gentle methods to help my situation! My husband is the best and now he’s working normally we alternate the plugs but bub goes from waking to screaming bloody murder in 0.5 seconds so im awake anyway also it takes me about 30m to fall back asleep after!
Right now (this week) things are particularly bad and he's waking every hour from 12am - sometimes the dummy is still in and he's screaming...
I'm exhausted, I'm overwhelmed and I honestly don't know how long I can carry on like this!
TIA x