Older baby sleep - will it get better on its own?

[origamifriends]

I keep telling myself this is fine and within the bounds of normal, but horrified looks from other mums/endless catchphrases from Instagram sleep coaches ("drowsy but awake!") are starting to make me wonder otherwise 😅

Sleep with 8 month old DD has always been a bit ad hoc. She was born prem and at just 4lb, so for many months from the beginning we were feeding round the clock on demand. She only started to go longer than about 1.5-2h max between feeds at around 6 months. This made it impossible to get into any form of feeding/sleeping routine.

Fast forward to now and she contact or pram naps in the day and is fed/rocked to sleep at night (has never been able to go down awake at any age). Not ideal in that I obviously can't do anything while she naps (apart from clock up up to 20km of walking a day!) and at night the absolute best we can get is one or two 1.5h chunks - the rest is about 30-45mins here and there before she needs to be helped back to sleep.

Will it get better on its own? I'm constantly flitting between thinking she's just being a baby and things will gradually work themselves out, and thinking we've already doomed ourselves to years of bad sleep through not being able to crack this sooner. Thanks for any wise words!

Oh and in terms of what we've tried so far - we've looked at sleep training to try to encourage her to fall asleep in the cot. None of the "gentle" suggestions seem to work for her - e.g. pick up put down, stroking/patting/shushing. She just gets increasingly worked up until she's picked up. Haven't tried any controlled crying methods but doubt those will work either - sometimes in longer car journeys she's cried out of tiredness and hasn't stopped until we've got home and held her.

DS2 (who was also very premature) wasn't quite so bad but was pretty close. I swear a flip switched when he got to 12 months corrected and I could put him down in the bed (either fed to sleep or patting and singing) and he'd do 4-5 hours in a go.

I co-sleep because I felt unsafe trying to feed him with my level of tiredness. At 8 months DP was still spending the first part of the night holding to keep him asleep so I got 3-4 hours in a go.

Oh, and DS1 was a great sleeper. I've been completely bamboozled by DS2, who was having none of the stuff that worked with DS1!

Thank you, @Merrow! That's encouraging. Other friends have also mentioned 12 months as a turning point - e.g. if their children started nursery then and had the routine changes associated with that. I'm also always relieved when people say one baby was difficult and the other fine (even though I'm sorry you had it tough with DS2!). Easier to make peace with it being luck of the draw rather than something we have/haven't done with DD.

We also turned to co-sleeping more recently for the same reasons (not sustainable/safe for someone to hold her for hours on end at night). She still BF and will go back to sleep very quickly if she wakes up next to me and has a quick feed.

Yes … I didn’t have the heart for sleep training.. my DD at 15 month old sort of sorted herself out….not many teenagers who sleep with mummy 😜😜😜

You are doing a great job

Haha, thank you! It's true - I've read a lot of posts from people a few years later where it's all happily a distant blur. I'm just a bit concerned about the return to work at 12 months if sleep is still as broken we now. Sometimes it sounds like it will take years to settle.