9 month old still wakes hourly and I'm broken 😫

[Luna20]

Okay so no judgement please. My 9 month old still wakes hourly through the night. He hasn't slept for longer than 60 minutes in one go since he was about a month old. He is EBF and we cosleep as I found it was the only way to manage. He has taken bottles of pumped milk in the past but not for a while.
I have 4 year old too. And I am struggling. Last week I got an intense migraine that forced me to take the day in bed which I never do. My husband went off sick at work to help. Honestly after a day and a half of being in bed I feel like a new woman again. I feel so much happier and have energy (kind of).
I am considering stopping breastfeeding now as I have realised the toll it is taking on me and also my family. I deserve to sleep. My children deserve a happy mum who isn't on the edge of a breakdown constantly due to exhaustion. The entire household benefits when I am well rested. But I feel guilty and selfish to stop breastfeeding. And I'm scared how this will impact the nights going forward. My baby basically just wants nipple in mouth all night long and won't take a dummy. The nights are bad but what if taking breast away makes them even worse? Like, at least baby settles straight back to sleep now with boob. I think I do feel done now with breastfeeding, it's just I know this is my last baby so I'm kind of reluctant to stop because I know that's it forever then! Is that silly?
My husband says I don't need to stop breastfeeding if I don't want (I mean I think I do I dunno) and he wants to try do a gentle version of the Ferber method to sleep train. This also makes me feel anxious and I just don't know what the right thing to do is. I know no one here can tell me what is or isn't either but I'm just hoping for maybe some advice, gentle guidance? Help 🙃

To be honest with you stopping breastfeeding is unlikely to fix the problem. I think you should stop if you want to but not just to try and improve the sleep issue.

I had a non sleeper and so did my friend they wjere both breastfed. She stopped due to returning to work around the same age as your little one. It didn't improve her DD's sleep at all, I didn't stop and couldn't get my DD to sleep either.

Would you consider moving him to his own room? I had to do this to night wean. DD was maybe 13 months and beginning to want to feed more frequently and it was comfort not food and I wasn't willing to have my breasts used in this way. She slept through after 3 nights.
Or, can you simply unlatch him every time he's suckling but not feeding? It's not a great habit if you want to keep bf but not being used as a human pacifier.

Could you try reducing night feeds first maybe? Realistically if you want to stop breastfeeding it's advised to wean down and then off slowly anyway to try and avoid mastitis etc. So maybe you could set a limit e.g. only breastfeed every 2 hours to start with then increase the gaps. But I think you would need to let your DH take the lead with the settling in between feeds otherwise it will be even more confusing and potentially upsetting for baby. I vaguely did this with my DC2 and it did seem to work in that I got a bit more sleep and my DH shared the load more with me - I set my limit at 3hrs then 4hrs. He started sleeping through at 10 months by which time I was only breastfeeding at the 1 night wake anyway (had slowly day weaned to formula for various reasons) so then it just naturally came to an end. That being said my DC2 wasnt generally as bad a sleeper as you're describing and he also had a dummy which did help.

If you want to stop breastfeeding that's totally valid but I think you're right to consider that it might not actually result in more sleep. Unless you get your DH to share the night work more, but you could do that without stopping the breastfeeding.

I'm sorry youre going through this. My DC3 is a similar age and a bad sleeper too, me and DH are both utterly exhausted, he tends to sleep 2-3hr blocks at a time but often less/hourly after about 4am ISH. It's exhausting and ice had similar thoughts over stopping breastfeeding. But mine actually has a bottle of formula in the night maybe 2-3 times a week from DH and he's awake for a lot longer in the night after a bottle feed and doesn't sleep for any longer after it either.

I think you need to think about the sleeping and feeding a little separately. At 9 months he doesn’t need to be feeding all night so this is a sleep habit you need to break but can do without giving up feeding if you don’t yet want to. In fact, if your husband could help and do the non-feeding settling (baby in one bed) , away from your smell of milk, it might be easier to sort out the sleep habit issues than if you are trying to settle him.

And loads of sympathy - I can’t imagine awful it is for you

Is the hourly wakening down to wind or something else?

Mine was like this, it just started getting better around 10m (not much better, but I got a couple of 2 hour chunks of sleep, then 3 hours, and so on) and continued to improve from there. She’s one now and it’s still not brilliant but it’s manageable.
i just accepted it, but I didn’t have a 4yo.
is dh maybe able to take 9mo to resettle in the night? Can you start working on new sleep associations? Lots of people told me to switch to formula too, but I didn’t want to risk it not working, though obviously you do then at least have a second person to get up instead of you.
will 9mo actually take a bottle though if they won’t take a dummy?