HELP!! Waking every 2 hours at night!

[Justii]

My DS is about to be 6m (we are 8 days away) and for the last 2/3 weeks he’s been waking up every 2 hours at night! I’m EBF and for a week or so have been giving him some solids.

He was always pretty good at waking up just twice a night but recently it’s constant. (He does fall asleep on boob sometimes and I’m afraid he might be associating feeding with sleeping) although as soon as I feed him at night he falls back to sleep with no problems but surely he can’t be hungry every 2 hrs at night??!

He’s good at self settling when it’s time to go down for the night although for naps and during the night he needs help to fall back asleep. I’m soooo tired and don’t know what to do, he’s always been a pretty good sleeper and the only time the same thing happened was at 4m sleep regression but then it passed. Help a girl out!!

TIA

Sleep training 😬

Hi OP! It sounds like you are in a very similar position to me at six months. I found that my baby’s night waking increased just after introducing solids and this took about a month and a half to settle. It was a very, very hard period of time for us sleep-wise, so solidarity with you and well done for making it this far.
I had the same worry as you regarding the sleep association. However, looking back I believe I was doing what my baby needed at the time. If I didn’t feed her to sleep, she wouldn’t settle for a long time and would more often than not become very upset. My baby also woke every two hours throughout the night at one point and I also didn’t think she could possibly be hungry. I have now accepted that perhaps it was a comfort thing. It sounds lovely in theory but was very difficult at the time, particularly as she never took a bottle. So, you have to do what works to get you the most sleep. Can you safely bed share? I wasn’t comfortable with this on a permanent basis so in the end we moved the big cot into our room, took off one side and made the cot mattress exactly level with ours. We pushed the cot mattress right up to the bed, put rolled up towels in between the far side of the cot mattress and the cot frame and essentially made our baby feel like she was in our bed, but she was in her own. It was our coping strategy with the disturbed nights as I could feed baby without getting out of bed myself.
There is lots of information online about safely bed sharing or co-sleeping and the safe sleep seven is a good starting point. I also read a La Leche League book called Sweet Sleep, which was very helpful and reassuring. I say all this as someone who swore she’d never bed share, but babies humble us and sleep is precious!
Fast forward to now. My little girl is nine months and across the past month we have seen huge improvements. Sometimes she is still fed to sleep at night, other times not. Daddy can now settle her to sleep. She naps in the cot in the day and doesn’t need to be fed to sleep for naps. Typically she wakes twice in the night and I feed her. This felt impossible to me at Christmas and even in this short space of time things are so much better. My advice is, do what works now. When it doesn’t work for you anymore, you have options to change things. I can outline separately what we did to cut down on the night feeding if that would be helpful. Good luck and give yourself a big pat on the back. You are doing amazingly!