Will my DD - almost 9 mo - ever sleep through?

[MedicalEd]

I am so tired. I am back at work now and it just seems to be one thing after another, teeth, a cold, some generic tummy bug causing explosive nappies.
The best she has ever done is the odd night to 4.30/5am, feed and back to sleep until 7. But that seems like a distant memory.
Last night it was 11.20, 1.20 until gone 3, 5.45 up for day.
I swear she was sleeping better at 3 months than she is now.
I don't know how much longer I can carry on like this.
We have tried giving water instead of bf but it doesn't seem to make much difference.
I can't do CC.
Are there really any techniques that work?

She will sleep through when she is ready, but until then you just have accept that this is your DD and there is no magic solution.

I was in the same boat as you, my DS didn't sleep through until he turned 3. So, until then I gave him a BF if he woke in the night, then cuddled him and put him back to bed. Sometimes this happened 4 times in the night. It was very tiring, but I had to accept that this was who my DS was and joke about how amazing it was that I could function on so little sleep. I also had DD to look after and hold down a job, it didn't kill me but I could have done without it.

You might get lots of helpful suggestions from other posters in reply to your thread, but sometimes you just have the child that doesn't sleep through and other people saying "I tried X, Y and Z and it definitely helped" can just make you feel worse. I listened to loads of helpful suggestions from my friends, colleagues, parents, but DS didn't listen.

I can only give you sympathy, not a magic technique, but you can have loads of loads of sympathy because I know how hard it can be. Hugs to you.

Huge sympathy. Dd was like this at nine months. There is a sleep regression around this time. By ten months she did start to sleep through. I think you just have to survive it tbh. It sucks though.

Poor you :( Do you do a dream feed? Does she seem hungry or just want to play? What do you do when she won't settle back down even though it's the middle of the night? I'm not going to try to be the font of knowledge here, but at least we can talk it through and maybe come up with ideas...

DS is nine months and has a dream feed at 11pm (ish) then wakes at 3 or 4 for a feed and then is up at about 5.30 for the day. I'm trying to just accept who he is, but I'm knackered! DH groans and grunts everytime he wakes and I need to get him to accept it too.

So, no advice but tons of empathy.

And just to prove my point he has just woken crying - DH has gone up to him.

I think it was around the 9 month mark that I began to pull dd into bed with me if she woke after I'd gone to sleep. Like you, I had just gone back to work and I couldn't bear to do cc as it went against all my instincts. So to give all of us a bit of sanity one night I brought her into my bed on her 1am waking. To my amazement, she slept much better the rest of that night and it became a habit. I have not felt sleep deprived since.

Dd is now 3 and goes to bed in her own room. On the rare occasions she wakes in the night, she automatically just gets up and comes to my bed. I really don't mind. She's still just a tot and she needs the closeness. But she actually sleeps really really well now, by herself most nights, and has learned to do so all by herself with no tears, trauma or sleep deprivation for us.

I hope you find a solution that suits you very soon.

Yes, one day she will. We just can't tell you when.

Your description sounds like my DD1 at 9 months. At 11 months she started sleeping through, but getting up at a 5:30. From 18 months onwards she has been a brilliant little sleeper...

Let's see what happens with DD2 - five months, up about four or five times, but very briefly because we co sleep for most of the night.

Agree with SingingSands. My DS is 2 & has only slept through a handful of times, with no rhyme nor reason as to why. I used to trawl threads looking for posts that would give me hope when I felt desperate but I believe that really, the only thing that makes it better is the passage of time!

She now usually only wakes once and when she does she comes into our bed (went into a single bed in her own room about 6m ago) and goes back to sleep easily so it's much easier to deal with. Her sleep gradually improved from about 18m and now I can look back and see that those awful months beforehand really aren't that long in the grand scheme of things, though you feel so exasperated at the time. I really feel for you and applaud your decision not to do CC as I could never do it. I think that children improve naturally without sleep training anyway and if it feels instinctively wrong to you, you shouldn't take the advice of people who think otherwise (I say the as the recipient of lots of IMO wrong advice!)

What are your thoughts on co-sleeping? I did this from very early on and have found it a godsend. Seems to be a solution for a few people I know with regards to getting as much sleep as you can in the instance of a wakeful child!

Sorry, should've read DD!!

Thank you all.
I know I wasn't really going to find a magic solution but it is really good to know I am not alone.
Nearly all my friends have babies who are going through by now.
She must have known I was slagging her off because last night she woke at 1.30 - DH went in and put her little projector twinkly music on and she went back to sleep until 4.45. She had a bf then and dozed on and off but was up at 6.15 - best night in ages!
We do co-sleep, kind of. She goes to bed in her cot and then I feed her on a single bed in her bedroom in the night and sometimes she just stays in there with me. Other nights she actually sleeps better if I put her back in her cot but I generally stay on the single bed for the rest of the night either way - can't be arsed getting up again.
Ruby We've tried dream feeds, doesn't make any difference.
Sometimes she has a big feed in the night, other times she doesn't seem bothered.
Sometimes she chats, even after a feed, and sometimes she is grisly.
She has improved as for ages it was 2am and 5am feeds, now she is pretty much down to one a night, usually.

SingingSands is a genius for stating so clearly what I am slowly beginning to see is true, babies just get the sleeping thing one day and none of our post reading, book skimming or 'helpful chats' with other mums can make the day come sooner. People would think us truly deranged if we expected babies to crawl at 12 weeks or walk soon after. 'they're not developmentally ready!' they would cry- why can't we just accept this to be the case with sleep?
DS is 10months and just started sleeping 7-5 (sometimes!); I've done nothing other than normal motherly behaviour to encourage sleep- fully BF as and when he seems hungry, sometimes comes into our bed sometimes not, has a dummy sometimes, I pick him up to settle him DH doesn't... But he's at exactly the same place now as all my CCing/ GFing/ 'don't make a rod for your back' acquaintances so it can't all be bad. Of course the downside is I've done 3 months back at work never having slept more than 4 hours in a row, but hey-ho, I've survived this far, just don't ask to look at my paperwork...
SingingSands thanks for the first sleep post I've read that really hit the nail on the head.