Gassy 8 month old

[nectarina]

Since introducing solids 2 months ago my DD is sleeping worse than she was before (before it was 2 - 4 night wakings, ebf). Now she can wake every hour or two, legs drawn up and farting. We've tried eliminating everything from her diet so that she's only eating about 3 things that she can tolerate, but our paediatrician said she needs to vary her diet and that colic is normal in a young baby. She said in order to sleep better we need to let her cry a bit and not feed her so much but this seems to go against my instincts especially as she seems to be, if not in pain, very uncomfortable.
So I suppose the question is, if she has stomach ache due to varying her diet is there anything that can be done about it, or do we resign ourselves to terrible sleep?

DS was like this from about 6 months to about 14 m.o. (IIRC)

I just bf him every time he woke, which got the wind moving and got him back to sleep. We co-sleep so that was relatively easy to do. The number of wakings did reduce gradually. He still does it now sometimes at 23 m.o.

I don't think it was allergies or intolerances - I did food exclusion diets later to see if it helped his eczema and none of it made any difference to anything.

Some people find they have success with not offering wind-inducing foods after lunchtime. I found doing massage on his stomach at bedtime helped too.

8/9 months is also classic sleep regression time so that could make it worse.

OK - thanks angels, I'm feeling resigned to it which is a relief. I'm fed up of constantly asking myself questions about what might be causing what when I just know she's an incredibly light sleeper. I do feed each time too, because its so quick, and she comes in with us if its a particularly bad night.
I need to make sure I don't tell anyone about it - because I don't like the replies (CIO), or looks of astonishment that DD has never slept through.
TBH I thought that no babies slept through for a couple of years until I had a baby and everyone was asking if she slept through - one person asked me when DD was less than a week old and I was waking her to feed her!
When you say that your DS is still sometimes like this at 23m do you mean waking every hour or two? yikes!

Well, he does have spells of frequent waking but it goes in phases (a month or so of waking once at my bedtime, then a phase of 4 x a night, then back to once a night etc etc). The worst is usually every 2 hours, and that's usually due to a developmental leap (as far as I can work out) and it stops again after a week or two on its own.

What I meant is that he does still wake sometimes due to gassiness. That seems to go in phases too - it's quite often at the moment (ie probably once most nights, although he wakes several other times too), but we have long phases with no wakings because of it.

I think it's normal for ebf babies not to sleep 'through' for a long while. Kellymom has some interesting abstracts of research on baby sleep.

I agree that it works best if you just don't tell people! I think lots of people forget what it was like. e.g. a friend said she happened to be looking through her (now teenager's) baby book and discovered he didn't sleep through until 18 months. She was amazed as she had no recollection of him being a difficult sleeper at all.