Help!

[EPS007]

Hello Everyone,
I hope you and your little ones are doing well. I’m a new mom to a 6-month-old baby girl, and to be honest, I’m really struggling. It’s taking everything in me to stay positive right now.
Everything we’ve tried with her has been met with resistance. She refused to sleep in her cot and still co-sleeps with us. She’s never slept through the night—two hours is the longest stretch she’ll sleep, and then she wakes up needing to nurse to fall back asleep. She’s exclusively breastfed, which was manageable until she hit her 4-month sleep regression. Now, she wakes every 2 hours (sometimes every 30 minutes) at night, needing to nurse to soothe herself.
When we first started giving her baths, she cried through the whole thing. She didn’t take to the car seat or stroller either and would howl whenever we tried to use them, though we kept at it. She won’t sit in a restaurant, no matter how carefully we try to plan around her schedule. We started her in swimming classes over two months ago, and she still cries every single time. She’s the only baby in both classes who does this, and I can’t help but feel embarrassed.
She also won’t let me leave the room without crying for me. She’s happy to play with her dad, but only if I’m nearby. I understand that I’m her main caregiver, but it means I can’t even shower or wash my hair without her getting upset. She doesn’t like sitting in her chair to play, so I end up carrying her around while trying to get my chores done. And even then, she still cries often.
I haven’t slept properly in six months. I’ve been telling myself this is just a phase and that she finds comfort in me, but I’m reaching my breaking point. I just want her to stop crying and to be happy. When I see other babies at classes, restaurants, or with friends, none of them seem to cry like this. It’s hard not to compare, and I feel so defeated.
Is it too much to ask for her to just be happy and content?

I can't speak for the other situations, but mine was NEVER happy to sit confined in a highchair in a restaurant, she always got bored shitless and frustrated quickly. She still does at age 2, we just accept we will tag team to either follow instructions around to play with her or eat our food! I have seen plenty of those docile ones who just sit while their mum can have coffee, cake and chat, but the reason you don't see the others in those situations is because we decide it's not worth the hassle and take them into the woods instead!
And when mine got hit like a truck with the 4 months sleep regression, after 10 torturous weeks of her waking every 25 -45 minutes, we sleep trained. It's not for everyone, but it worked quickly and easily for us. By night 3 she was sleeping through the night and usually still does unless ill, teething, or learning a new skill etc.

@teaandkittehs we tried tag team but unless we are back in the car or home she refuses to cal
down :(
did your LO cry during sleep training ? Im in two minds about Trying it!!

She did but we used a method where we went back to comfort her after every 2 minutes. It was all over in 12 minutes on night 1, 7 minutes on night 2, 3 minutes on night 3, and straight to sleep after that. I gather it can be a lot worse with some children though and won't work for all of them. If she had cried for hours I probably couldn't have seen it through!

thats awesome!!
was there any particular guide you followed ??

It was the advice of my health visitor! I usually hate her because my child always does things a week or two after the exact average says she should and the HV always made a massive deal about it, but the one useful thing she did was tell me about that sleep training method.
It's a tough decision to make, so the first question you need to ask yourself is, can you let your child cry? If they answer is yes, the next question is. . . For how long? We didn't feel comfortable leaving her to cry for long, but my friend and her husband decided upon 17 matters which is an odd amount of time, no idea how they arrived at that! Also, what do you want to do when they cry? Some people pick them up and comfort them, but we left her in the cot and stroked her until she was calm. She always calmed down very quickly.

Oh, that sounds very hard! None of the individual things sound particularly unusual, but when you add them all together, it's a lot to deal with. I found it helped to lean in to baby's needs/preferences where I could. (I had two low sleep needs, very mummy-centric, high engagement babies.)

She's not taking to swimming – do you have to go? Are there other classes you could try so you get out a bit? She might like something like library rhyme time, where the expectation is that she'll on your knee pretty much the whole time. She doesn't do restaurants. What about a walk through the park with her in a sling when the weather is decent? It can still be quality time together and a good chance to talk.

With her bath, what temperature is it? I know what the guidance says. I also know that both of mine considered anything under 38-39C to be baby torture, unless it was a heatwave.

With sleep, if you decide (or end up needing) to keep going with co-sleeping, I found it helped to deliberately not check the time or count the wake-ups, and certainly not go on my phone/similar, but to deliberately keep myself half asleep. Then I fell back fully asleep faster of course, but I suspect it also meant my body treated the feeds as more like the 'light sleep' part of my sleep cycle, rather than an actual wake so I got a better sleep pattern overall.