Hourly wakings- driving me insaneeee

[An89]

DS is 5 months and has been waking hourly for 1.5 months now, used to be for comfort, now for comfort and feeding.
I am going mad with sleep deprivation and want to leave DS in rhe cot crying. Sick sick of it!!!

When and how does this stop??

poor thing OP! Have you tried any form of sleep training? We did a gentler version of Ferber at this age - started with 2 mins, then 5 mins and never beyond 10 mins. It worked well (although DS is now 18 months old and has definitely regressed recently!)

I had one that woke a lot in the night and I mean a lot!

what’s his feeding like in the day @An89?

Ahhh thank you, may try this. By 10 mins is that 10mins of consistently crying?

It maybe that you need to investigate starting to wean....

@An89Can your husband / partner takeover for a few hours at night? Alternatively if the baby is hungry can you try a bottle of formula instead?

My baby did this from 3 months and I ended up sleep training just before 6 months... I was dreading it, but the most he ever cried was 20 minutes, generally much less, and he immediately starting waking only once a night thereafter. So in the grand scheme of things, I'd say less crying than he would have done ultimately otherwise. I did check ins and 2 minutes and 3 minutes, never had to go beyond that. He now pretty much falls asleep straight away with no crying. I will say that if he had cried much more I probably wouldn't have been able to stick with it.

I did make sure we were in a good routine for naps first (although he still only takes them in the pram or carrier but I'm picking my battles) and that he was used to going to sleep in his own bed and with me just next to him patting etc. So all I was doing was removing my presence and also took his dummy at the same time which had become more of a hindrance than a help.

I'd encourage you to read the Ferber book and also there's a respectful sleep training group on Facebook (which does have some very extreme American views about it, but if you ignore that and just read the guides it's useful). I weighed it up for a good couple of months before deciding to sleep train, but what did it for me was reading stories from people with toddlers who had started resenting their own child for still waking frequently. You can't pour from an empty cup.

We used the “sleep ladder” approach around this age, when I wasn’t sure I could stomach full-on Ferber (but no judgement for those using Ferber… it works!)

When baby fussed, we’d go through the following “ladder” of interventions, every 3 minutes:

1. do nothing, see if they settle
2. whisper to them: “I’m here, but it’s the nighttime. Nighttime is for sleeping”
3. pick them up and give them a hug
4. rock them for a few minutes
5. only then offer a feed

the first few nights we’d get as far as #5 one or two times. After a few nights though they’d sleep through most of the time