Lack of sleep killing me

[Toomuchtooyoung01]

DD is 3.5yrs and woke regularly throughout the night until she was well over 2yrs. Around this time got pregnant with DS & had insomnia throughout the pregnancy. DS is now 9 months and sleeping similarly terribly. DD has now started waking up throughout the night. I am literally getting an maximum of 3hrs broken sleep evrry single night and it is killing me. If I'm not up with one its the other one. It would be comical the way they tag team each other in if I wasnt so exhausted. I am horribly short tempered and snappy with my kids, always shouting, we do go out daily to the park or playground etc and they are well looked after but I feel very much like I'm going through the motions as I'm too tired to enjoy anything. I look at their beautiful faces and feel barely anything except painfully tired. OH works long hours and isn't home much to help. No family to help and my friends all have their own babies or are back at work so dont feel I can put on them by asking for a break occasionally. Definitely no money to get a cleaner etc in to help on that front. DD is only doing 3 mornings a week at nursery at the moment and even though that's good for her and she enjoys it lots, its still not a break for me as I stillnhave DS to look after not to mention the constant piles of washing etc
The term breaking point has always felt like a cliche to me but that is how I feel now, like I can't go on like this. I'm being a horrible mum to my kids and they deserve more. I feel at best like I have a bad hangover every day, that horrible nausea and headache and general feeling of weakness.
PLEASE someone give me some advice on what to do when your kids just won't sleep, and why on earth has my 3yr old started waking up every 5mins again? I feel irrationally angry and every little thing sets me off into a rage. DD dropped some smarties on the floor yesterday and you would have thought she had dropped rocks of crack for her baby brother to find the way I lost it.
I didnt used to be like this and now I'm everything I didn't want to be as a mum. I'm becoming a monster and my kids are going to hate me

@Ohalrightthen

Loads of people advocate for CIO / extinction across the internet, actually. Loads of people say to "keep going". And it sounds like that poster did it some years ago when advice may have been different.

If 9 hours crying is so dreadfully wrong, why is 4 hours crying ok? At what hour does it go from totally fine, to neglectful, exactly?

I have no problem with people saying sleep training worked for them, but as you yourself seem to be saying - with some kids it doesn't. Women on here are being told they have to do it or are somehow letting their kids and themselves down. That's not actually helpful.

There are quite a lot of people on this thread not showing much understanding our empathy to the OP (who said she didn't want to sleep train), or to the poster who attempted it for 9 hours in vain.

Sleep training isn't a magic cure all and it doesn't work for every child. It didn't for my eldest (we thought it had after 4 nights, but 3 nights later and they were back to waking several times a night again - subsequent attempts at training went absolutely nowhere).

That said, if you haven't tried it yet, you should. We did manage to improve our youngest's sleep considerably by training, on about the third or fourth try. I think the key is having one person do the training and for that person to be in a good mental space first. One of the things I found when horrendously sleep deprived is that I gave in way too easily, I didn't have the fortitude to see past the immediate tears. So my husband took over, did the whole 5 min, 10 min, 15 min etc. and got up if there were issues in the night. Within a week or so there was a noticeable difference and now they wake once or twice a night but can usually self soothe. Our sleep is still disturbed, but not having to get up and go to them makes a big difference.

You need someone to take the children for a couple of nights so you can claw your way back from the edge. If your husband needs to take leave then so be it - otherwise he'll have a much bigger issue with work when you keel over or something worse from exhaustion

My DD woke approx every 50mins until she was 13 months. I don;t really have memories from that period of my life due to the sleep deprivation . . . . I feel awful, sometimes she says to me 'tell me baby stories' and I have nothing, it's a blank. Bad ongoing sleep deprivation is so so so terrible. In the end a professional sleep therapist sorted it out in 3 days. We hired her privately (although she also worked for the NHS) and it was a couple of hundred pounds. So it wasn't cheap. However if I was ever in the same situation again I would sell my kidney if I had to in order to get the help, I wouldn't let it go on 13 months. Can you get together the money to hire a sleep therapist?

@Ohalrightthen I don’t think that leaving a baby to cry for 3-4 hours is any better personally! When I tried CC my baby cried for less than an hour but it still left him terrified of bedtime, shaking and crying as soon as we stepped in to his room at night. It took me weeks to undo the damage. I still regret it to this day and it was over 10 years ago. I actually tried CC off the back of a thread on mumsnet where posters said that I shouldn’t expect my husband to help if I refuse to do CC. Whilst for some it might be a quick and relatively painless method for many it is not. It is possible to sleep train gently though without leaving baby to cry alone, it just takes more time/effort.

@MoonJelly

You’re not doing your babies any favours by letting them wake up so often either

How do you "let" a baby wake up? You can wake them up, but you can't stop them waking up by themselves.

Ok I’ll rephrase. You’re not doing your baby any favours by not giving them the skills to settle themselves after waking up.