8 month sleeping

[CamWHU96]

Hi all,

This is my first post on mums net.

Our little boy is almost 8 months old. He is such a happy little baby, almost always smiling and a delight in the day time. However at night he has never slept well or properly. I understand for the first 6 months or so they are up and down, however we have never seen any improvement. From 0-6 months we had him downstairs with us in a little cot and for the first 4.5 months he was fine and only woke for feeds. Then as we neared 6 months if we talked a bit to loud he would wake. So we decided at 6.5 months we may be good for him to go into a cot in our bedroom next to our bed. We set up the baby monitor and for the first few weeks he was great he slept from 7:30pm ish to around 9:45-10pm. He then started waking in that time frame a few times. Then it started every 20-40 mins until in the end My girlfriend just stays upstairs with him. He has a feed before bed and if we are lucky he may sleep in his own cot for 30 mins then after that he gets upset and just wants to be in with us, of course then both mine and my girlfriends sleep isnt as we have a little one in with us!
Then he will wake up every few hours at best, but this last few days he’s been waking every 30 mins.

We have been weening him for a few weeks, the last 2 weeks he has been loving his food and eats all 3 meals of the day. Plus a few snacks.

Now and then though we do get a good evening and he will wake up once between 7:30pm-10pm and then when in our bed he may only wake up twice or three times but this is rare.

we did try the controlled fry it out method one night but after an hour and half baby was to upset and showed no sign of settling and it wasn’t nice on both us parents so we don’t think that’s the way forward for us.

we give him a good concrete routine. Bath 45 mins before bed, a bed time story, cuddles and milk before bed which he drinks the whole bottle. We just don’t know where we are going wrong? Or is this just babies and some are easy and good sleepers and some are not?

sorry for the long post and sorry if I haven’t been clear enough with baby terms etc. just a 1st time dad trying to help my son and my girlfriend.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I have an 8 month old too. I'm no expert but my thoughts are usually that bad night time sleep is often linked to daytime sleep. So need to consider how long are his naps in total and wake windows, is his wake window before bed long enough, where is he napping during the day (I.e same cot as nighttime or somewhere else?

Once you look at those things and make some adjustments you may see an improvement especially if he isn't currently napping in the cot during day. X

I've been in your shoes.

How does he fall asleep? For us it was a settling problem: he would only fall asleep while feeding. Once we resolved this issue it was like having a different baby

My daughter is 7.5 months and exactly the same. Very happy in the day, awful at night. She won't nap longer than 30 minutes however I try which I don't think helps the nights.

She is my second though and my 1st was exactly the same. I worried I was doing something wrong with him and I absolutely hated the nights, I found them very stressful. I probably could have done some sort of sleep training but I didn't want to. This time round I'm just going with the flow and I am much happier to have no expectations. My son slept through from around 14 months, I'm hoping my daughter will eventually learn too.

Good luck (and you aren't doing anything wrong!)