Please help, I don't feel like I can do anything right at the moment. My 11-month-old breastfeeds 4 times a day plus 2-3 times overnight and refuses to take a bottle. He's due to start at nursery in January when I go back to work and so I've been trying to reduce the feeds to make the transition easier for him. A few days ago I tried reducing the daytime feeds to 3 but that's caused him to reverse cycle and wake even more at night (we had got down to three nights in a row where he only woke and fed once at 4 am which was unheard of for him, now we're back to 3-4+ times a night and sometimes very hard to settle even after milk, he was up 8-10pm last night and again 3.30-5.30am plus two wakes to feed in-between). Ideally I wanted to nightwean him before I went back to work too but that just seems impossible now. He's a very sensitive baby and hasn't responded well to sleep training at all when we've tried it previously, he gets very distressed and will cry for over two hours for nights on end. He's also not particularly keen on solids, will take a few bites of food at each meal but nothing more.
I don't know what I'm asking really... will he cope with nursery (of course I know he will in the end)? Will I cope with going back to work on what I'm expecting to be horrendous sleep with the nursery transition? Should I focus on reducing daytime milk feeds or nightime first? Those of you with very sensitive babies, is there anything you did that helped with night weaning or sleep training? Will he ever sleep??? I worked so hard to establish breastfeeding at the beginning (tongue tie, weight loss etc etc) and now I kind of wish we had resorted to bottle/formula feeding to make it easier to wean him off it and for someone else (DH, nursery) to be able to give him milk, it just feels like I'm responsible for every wake, which won't be sustainable when I'm back at work, especially if his sleep gets worse as I'm expecting. The last few nights have been so hard and I haven't been able to settle him, lots of crying and thrashing about in my arms, but gets even worse if put in his cot - possibly teething too but honestly who knows at this point, he's never been a good sleeper. But (usually) self settles at the beginning of the night an absolute dream, just the night wakes he's tricky for, and I didn't expect them to still be so frequent at this age.