fen I think William and Norry must be in cahoots!!! He woke up 8 times on Fri night, 6 on Sat and last night woke up 2 hrs after going to bed and took 2.5hrs to resettle (but then actually slept really well once he was asleep)[grrrrr]
I rang our local parenting helpline, who have really helped me in the past with sleep issues. Their opinion was that frequent nightwaking and staying up for ages was down to a combo of 2 things: overtiredness and the sleep regression they have when they start to crawl. They were reassuring that it's really really common at the 7-9mth age range and it will pass. The advice I got to help speed up a return to normal sleep was to enforce daytime naps so he has 2 of at least 1hr 15mins and possibly a third catnap if he wakes before 3pm from his afternoon nap. If he wakes after 3pm it's a bit late to get a third nap in, so aim for an early bedtime (we're currently putting him to bed at 6!)
As for staying awake for hours, William is waking and not crying but laughing to himself and having a crawl around his cot. The opinion on that was that in their experience you can't make them go back to sleep if they're doing that, so just ignore until he either puts himself back to sleep or cries - then do whatever you'd normally do to settle him. The other key thing was getting him to self settle, which William is more than capable of doing - and I hear him stir and go back to sleep at least once or twice in the night - he's just getting overtired to a point where he's so wired he can't get back to sleep.
I love "no cry sleep solution" if only because it's the only sleep book I've read that gives you realistic expectations of babies sleep patterns i.e. that the average baby isn't sleeping through until well into the second 6 months of their life. The basic prinicples are to keep a diary of his day and night sleeps for 10days, including how what you did to resettle him, and then review what you think the issues are. You then pick solutions based on your problems - so Norry probably thinks he needs to feed to sleep to resettle at night, so you would change that association gradually. To break the feed to sleep association you basically delatch him once he's finished drinking and moved onto comfort sucking and move him away from your breast asap, if he cries to go back on try and settle him with a cuddle, but if he still won't settle, put him back on for up to 30secs then delatch again. Keep going until he comes off without crying. The first few times he's likely to be pretty much asleep when he comes off, but over a few nights he will eventually stop feeding to sleep. You can then either try and get him into the cot while he's drowsy or you may need to combine that with teaching him another way to self settle - the main way she uses in the book is to rock them until they're drowsy, then put in the cot. Once he's happy with that, rock until he's calm then put in the cot. Then move onto just patting in the cot, and basically just gradually withdraw how much assisstance you give him until he's able to put himself to sleep.
I used it to break William's feed to sleep association and it worked very rapidly. We weren't as successful with the withdrawing of the rocking to sleep - we got as far as patting in the cot but no further, so we did leave him to cry one night. I think by that point he was actually well able to settle himself though, as he cried for less than 5 mins before going to sleep.
The methods do work, but they are alot slower than the methods that involve some crying, so it depends how rapidly you want a solution.
After that epic summary you probably don't need to borrow the book 