To ask for your advice on how to get baby to sleep - please help!

[Springbaby2023]

My 5.5 month old baby will not sleep and has not slept well since 3.5 months. I’ve posted about this before but it’s just getting worse and worse, he’s now up every 30 mins - hour over night. Never does more than an hour.

Last night he was up god knows how many times (it’s usually around 10 when I count) and has now been awake since 4.30th and my three year old will be up any minute. Today will be hell.

I’m at my wits end and can’t think clearly on it because of being so tired.

He has a good nap schedule but is fed to sleep (EBF) which I think is the issue. Also has a dark room, white noise, isn’t too hot/ too cold, has teething medicine, anything you can think of basically. Won’t take a dummy.

As far as I can see I’ve got three options:

1. Wait it out, know it’s a phase and will pass
2. Sleep train
3. Introduce solids to see if that helps (I don’t think it will but MIL swears it will so thought I’d include it)

I honestly go round and round in circles trying to decide what to do and it’s driving me just as mad as the lack of sleep itself. I don’t really want to sleep train but I can’t keep living like this.

Probably opening a can of worms here but has anyone got any advice on what to do? Or even just on how to survive this phase.

There are two types of allergy. Immediate and delayed. Immediate are what most people think of as allergies rashes hives and anaphylaxis
Then there are delayed allergies sometime clumped in with intolerances. Symptoms can be a bit more difficult to spot there are gastric but if a baby doesn't have the words for "my tummy hurts" it might be just crying and sleep disturbance as a symptom. My daughter gets the loose stools and now she is three she tells me that she has a sore tummy. She also has silent reflux and this predominantly presents as disturbed sleep and she only sleep whilst I'm holding her. I've just remembered she had a gluten intolerance for a while and she has now outgrown this. Her only symptom was a bit of squirming and trapped wind before bed. In the end by stopping cous cous and mostly using brown rice pasta instead of regular pasta got rid of the difficulties putting her to sleep.

My daughter has always napped so much better than her evening/night sleep.

Do they have frequent hiccups and if you lie them on their back can you hear any milk coming back up and being swallowed again. We can hear each time my daughter refluxes. Its somewhere between a hiccup and a gulp for us.

As part of the discussion of newborn's sleeping through the night. My dad was slept through the night since 8 weeks actual and 36week gestation if adjusted. He was on condensed milk instead of breastmilk or formula. My nan was meant to keep waking him but didn't as you don't wake a sleeping baby. There wasn't an obvious problem!

No it was her third she expressed knowing there maybe a time in the future she would need to if Ill or on returning to work.

My youngest woke hourly until 11 months old and it was hell on earth. She did improve eventually and naturally. Sending strength, I've been there.

Thanks everyone. This has been a thread of lots of mixed messages and advice but it’s all been really helpful and cleared my head a bit.

We’ve decided to try sleep training. I know it’s not for everyone but I think it’s right for our family. We will see how it goes, if it starts feeling wrong to me I’ll stop, but at the moment I feel comfortable with the decision. We will then start weaning around 26 weeks as advised (I think he’s ready now, but I agree it won’t make much difference and could make things worse so we want to try and tackle the sleep first).

Anyway we decided to ‘pull the plaster off’ and go tonight. He cried no more than four minutes when first put down (with two minute checks, and at no point hysterical crying). Woke as usual after 30 mins but again settled in less than four mins - without a feed! And has been asleep ever since. He went down at 7 and it’s only 9pm now so not much to go off BUT this is the most of an evening I’ve had in ages. DP did all the settling and will do until 10pm / 11pm at which point I’ll take over and feed on demand as I don’t want to try to night wean at this point. I’ve also booked in a consultation with one of the consultants recommended on here for a week’s time in case I start to feel this way isn’t working for us.

I know not everyone will agree with this method and I wouldn’t have dreamt of it with my first, but at the end of the day I know that lack of sleep is making me a bad mum at the moment to both of my children so I genuinely feel that a little bit of crying will make everyone happier in the long run. (I may change my mind on this, but I think you can only go on what feels right for your own circumstances at the time).

I’ll let you know how we get on!