Hey Mamas and Papas
I’m looking for some advice (or maybe just a place to let off steam)!
My little boy is 6 months old and I’m seriously struggling with the amount of scream crying and lack of sleep. I feel like for every foot we make forward, we take 3 back.
Within a few weeks of being born, he was crying for hours and hours a day, every day, so clear signs of Colic. We went back and forth the GP soooo many times. They gave us everything to try. One minute they were saying it’s colic, try infacol, try colief drops, try this try that. Then it was silent reflux. Again more medicine (I think we tried about 4 different things for reflux). Then they said it was CMPA / Intolerance so we switched to hydrolysed formula. Nothing worked. We tried changing his regular milk. No difference.
This had been going on about 4 months by this point and eventually the GP said to me he’s simply just a ‘cry baby’ and we just needed to wait it out and the good news was that by this age, he should be close to outgrowing it.
Anyway, the last 2 months there has been improvement. The crying isn’t 3+ hours every day but it’s far from outgrown.
He is a terrible sleeper. Naps and overnight. I’ve tried absolutely everything. I know how long his wake windows are and he often gets tired the same time each day so I can preempt when a nap is due and try getting him down before he gets overtired but it just happens anyway. Any attempt at putting him down just results in him screaming and screaming. He doesn’t like to sleep on me either, same response. Nothing I do settles him and often the crying just continues for the best part of an hour before he crashes with exhaustion. The longest his naps last are about 22 minutes so it’s difficult to go through a good hour of crying just for him to get 20 minutes of sleep.
Overnight starts off well but quickly goes south. We’ve had a bedtime routine since really early on and it does appear to have done the trick. He recognises it’s time for bed and goes down quite quickly in his crib. After about 2 hours, he starts to stir. Sometimes we’ve intervened to settle him quickly, other times we’ve left him to try resettle but neither work. The stirring turns to crying, he wakes and then he cries continuously.
About 4 weeks ago I felt like I was barely coping with such little sleep so I lied him in my bed and he instantly fell asleep through to 5am (he usually feeds in the middle of the night). The next night I put him in his crib as usual but same thing happened and I moved him into the bed with me. This has become a thing now over the last 4 weeks. I’m not against co-sleeping but I’m just worried that it’s not an ideal age to start it. At 6 months I thought we’d be moving him to his own bedroom but here we are, unable to even get him to sleep in his own bed.
The last 3 nights I’ve tried really hard to just keep resettling him in his own crib but by about 3/4am I’ve given up and ended up sleeping in bed with him because I can’t stand the crying.
Between the colic for months, and this crying to sleep all the time, I just feel like I’m doing a terrible job and I return to work next month and really don’t know how I’m going to cope when I have to add an 8 hour shift 5 days a week into the equation as well.
Appreciate any advice people can give!