Sorry if this is long - trying to include all the info!
We co-sleep with 5m/old DS and have done since his birth - we have a bedside cot but he wanted to sleep close and we just went with it. He sleeps right up next to me, facing me, usually with his arm across me. This works really well for us, he has never cried in the night, we get lots of sleep and it has made BF easy and so on. From about 11 weeks we started a bedtime routine of bath and then I feed him to sleep (in our bed) at 7pm, and this worked fine and he would sleep most of the evening through till 10.30ish when I went up to bed, fed him and he'd sleep again. I'd often have to go up and feed him back to sleep if he woke but this wasn't a problem and he'd go off again.
Over the last couple of weeks, this evening sleep has become a thing of the past. It's varying from him being wide-awake (but clearly tired) after his feed, or sleeping for 5-15 mins before being wide awake again. If I give up and just go to bed he'll feed to sleep and stay asleep fine. It feels like he just can't sleep without me. He never really falls asleep without being next to or on me, or when out and about in the buggy (will usually wake up as soon as we're home and the movement stops), or in the sling.
On the plus side, he's a very good sleeper - nothing much disturbs him once asleep, I could probably be in a club next to massive speakers and he wouldn't wake up! He is never properly 'awake' in the middle of the night, just sleepily feeds and then drifts off again.
I'd really like to work out a way of getting him to sleep alone again for this stretch in the evening. It's the only time I have to get stuff done, let alone leave time for OH and I.
I don't want to do anything which upsets DS, and leaving him to cry even briefly isn't something that would work for me. I feel like I really need some sort of strategy to get him to go to bed alone for the evenings though - at the moment we end up bringing him downstairs as I don't want to make bedtime a battleground, but perhaps we're setting a bad pattern with this. Sometimes I put him in the sling and he sleeps but this isn't great for me/us.
Do any other co-sleepers have any advice on how we can start gently moving him in the right direction?