Nearly 9mo sleep horrendous. Am out of ideas and energy. Any tips?

[JumpingJellyfish]

DD2 is nearly 9 months old. She has never slept in long stints through the night, but if anything has got worse over the past few weeks. I have been cosleeping to get any rest possible but I'm being woken by her so often at the moment it's almost impossible to feel human. I have 2 older DCs and also work part-time so I really feel the need to address her sleeping as am lacking energy to deal with normal life in the day!

She takes bottles during the day, eats pretty well (combination of purees and lots of finger foods), takes a bedtime bottle at ~7.30pm the has a breastfeed around 11pm and then "snacks" a few times from me later in the night if I can't get her to settle. She is teething but if she's like my others no teeth will appear for a while yet (13 months for first teeth with other DCs).
I tried stopping b'feeding altogether and settling her just with bottles/water/shushing/singing etc. for a few nights last week but still very unsettled, so in the end due to exhaustion I went back to b'feeding her a couple of times each night....

She doesn't settle to sleep herself ever- but I don't mind rocking her to sleep etc. if I have to but it's the fact she's waking so often that's killing me. I know she is using me as a dummy/soother (she doesn't have a dummy otherwise!) and she's in the "bad" habit of falling asleep on me etc. but are there any good/simple ways of settling her otherwise? I should know these things her being my third, but my brain is mush and I just kind of hoped her sleep would improve by itself as she ate more protein etc. in the daytime....

Any help much appreciated!!

My DD is 7 months old. She is breast fed and on solids 3 times a day. I was waking her for a dream feed at approx 2230, and she was then waking anywhere between 2-6 times a night for either a feed or her dummy.

I was getting exhausted and miserable, so after watching that toddler sleep programme on C4 I brought the book by Alison Scott Wright. I was very sceptical, could not believe my DD would be able to do without her dummy or sleep more than a few hours.

We implemented her technique on Friday night-basically involves putting them to bed, no dummies, no waking for dream feed etc, and then repeating the same phrase eg its sleepytime, each time you go back into them.

Within 30 minutes she was asleep, woke at 2am and was awake until 4am moaning, then settled till 7am. The subsequent 2 nights she has slept over 11 hours each night. I cannot believe it, and it goes to show the dummy/night feeds etc were more a prop for me than for her. It's obviously early days, but clearly not a coincidence as she has never slept for this long at night before.

You have to be consistent and I think a bit desperate to try it, but it does work quickly. We did it at the weekend so did not have to do much in the day if we were exhausted, but it was no where near as bad as I thought it would be.

Hope thats of some help. Good luck and hope you get a good nights sleep soon.

OP, it'll be the 9 month sleep regression. It's horrible, but very common. Not much you can do other than stick it out, do whatever you can to maximise everyone's sleep and not worry about bad habits at this stage. It will pass, though.

Any form of sleep training is unlikely to be successful at this stage. The regression is caused by a huge developmental spurt and is complicated by things like separation anxiety.

More info here, here and here.

Sleep regression! trix that technique must have involved a bit of crying no? Sounds a bit tooeasy!

DS at 10 months was a really bad sleeper up until 9 months. At that age he was dropping to two naps, learning to do all sorts (wave, cruise, babble etc) plus was teething. Then all of a sudden it got better and he wakes once for a feed

I was pretty hot on making sure he's in a good routine with two naps, consistent bedtime routine, early bedtime if he missed or had a poor nap etc etc.

His self settling has gone out the window - he was pretty good at about 6-7 months but it stopped. But I don't mind as he gives me more sleep!

Thanks ladies- sorry for the delay in replying!
Sleep regression then, it does seem to fit the bill! :)
She actually slept slightly better last night, still woke pretty frequently but settled quite quickly with a b'feed, whereas recently we've had some prolongued wakings with lots of crying in spite of trying all possible tricks to help her :( I think what's made it all worse is that she's full of a nasty cold too.

So from what I gather re. the 9 month sleep regression there is little you can do and all the "bad" habits I've got her into (e.g. b'feeding to sleep, cosleeping etc.) aren't making it worse?! [hopeful emoticon] And if we just keep muddling through things should get better in a few weeks?!