Help with baby sleep issues

[SamBl1987]

Sorry if I've broken any posting rules, or anything else - first time posting :)

I'm a first time dad, my DW and I have a 4 month old that we're struggling with a little.

I won't go into everything but the biggest issue we have is that he cries his eyes out whenever he is tired and refuses to sleep unless he's in our arms - we don't mind keeping him in our arms, he's a baby after all and if he wants to sleep in our arms for 2 hours at a time we can live with that.

But when he is tired, no matter what we do helps, and he seems to cry for ages before finally falling asleep after almost an hour of rocking him. Sometimes we try and put him down after about 45 minutes, but he'll be back up like a shot and then we repeat the whole process.

We're very lucky that between about 10pm - 6am (most days) he will stay fast asleep on his own and maybe wake up twice for a feed but back out like a light.

He throws up alot of milk, we're pretty sure he has reflux which I'm not sure would be the cause of his sleep problems? To try and help we were suggested by our midwife to use Carobel to thicken his milk (he is given breastmilk via bottle) which we're just waiting to arrive in the post.

Just hope someone had advice for how you dealt with baby sleep at that age.

Could you try replacing one form of soothing (ie rocking) for another like music, white noise, dummy, feed?

Ideally you want to get them to point where you are putting them down drowsy but awake and then they do the last bit of getting them self to sleep on their own. There is also controlled crying, which really isn't for everyone but is also another way of breaking the rocking habit if you are at the end of your tether. We did a soft version of this from 6 months.

All of that said though if he is settling down during the night with just a feed it seems to indicate that he is capable of falling asleep another way but is perhaps really used to the rocking during the day.

Try whit this.