Our baby has just turned 8 months, for the last few months she will only go to sleep being walked in her buggy. This is for both naps and bedtime. For her naps we get her to sleep in her buggy in our communal garden and then bring her up to the flat and she stays asleep in her buggy with her rockit on. She has 2 naps a day which vary between 40 mins - 2 hours, she’s not very consistent. At night, she goes to sleep being walked in her buggy and we bring her up and she gets put into my bed where I bed share alone with her. We recently bought a cot for her and tried transferring her from pram to cot but with little success. Because I do nighttime with her bedsharing my partner will do her day time naps and bedtime which is usually the more stressful of the two. He has just started a new job where he is working late and I need to do 3-5 bedtimes a week alone. For some reason bedtime never goes as well for me alone and she will cry in her buggy and won’t go to sleep being rocked either. It takes her eventually getting exhausted to fall asleep. She wakes a few times in the night also and I bottle or breast feed her back to sleep.
I am really struggling with managing her bedtime alone, the initial getting her to sleep I mean, and wondered has anyone had anything similar and can advise how they overcame it? We live in flats so when she’s crying in the garden I feel really guilty for everyone who lives around it so I’ll take her into our carpark as I don’t feel safe walking around the complex alone late at night. Ideally I’d like to stop her from needing the pram to get to sleep but even just at bedtime would be ideal. We don’t want to use any cry it out methods, it’s not our style, I was considering trying pick up put down but she just seems hyper when she’s on the bed and will roll around for hours and cries immediately in her cot.
Sorry for the long post! Any helpful advice is appreciated.