DS was a good sleeper, now he's rubbish!

[Jayfer]

We've been very lucky, from birth my DS (6 months old) has been a fairly good sleeper during the night, only waking a couple of times and more recently sleeping through. Now he's a complete pain. He wakes at least once an hour after 10pm and has been doing that for the past two weeks. His bedtime routine is brill, bath, bottle, bed and he goes down like a dream. But this continual waking is driving us potty.

We've recently dropped his 10pm feed and for the past week he's had hand, foot and mouth disease so he's not been feeling that great. We've tried continual calpol/nurofen combo throughout the night in case he is in pain. We're going to try him with a little bit of milk later to see if he is hungry.

Anyone have any suggestions?

DH and I are totally exhausted - I've come down with tonsillitis and I'm disabled with a chronic illness and lack of sleep makes it 10x worse and DH has been struggling with redundancy/new job stress this week. AGH!

One of the great surprises I found when I had my DD was that sleep was not a linear thing (baby wakes up a lot when small, gradually wakes up less, then sleeps through forever). It goes up and down. And just because it's bad at the moment doesn't mean it won't go back to good, and then a bit bad, and then really good, and then bad again.

sounds like way too much of a coincidence that he's been ill - although he's only been ill for a week and sleeping badly for 2 weeks, might he have been coming down with it and you didn't realise? Think the medicine sounds like a good idea. Maybe the illness is also coinciding with a tooth / growth spurt / developmental spurt, which can all mess with the sleeping.

Huge sympathy though - I felt dreadful with lack of sleep and it's really really awful, isn't it.

Thanks for the reply. We had a better night last night, thankfully. He's no longer poorly but is still teething, bless him.

Its all a bit of a guessing game isn't it?!

Just to say that when my da has had hand foot and mouth - twice now - it has absolutely destroyed his sleep for a week or so.

Thanks for that Dycey - it seemed v odd to go from being a good sleeper to an absolute nightmare!