How do I get DD to only wake once or twice per night?

[bagelmonkey]

DD is now 10 months old. Like her parents, she is not a good sleeper. She goes to bed reasonably well at about 7pm after a bath & BF. She is usually drowsy when she goes down. She tends to wake at around 11pm and I BF her back to sleep. She then wakes again 2-3 times before about 5 or 6am, after which I cannot get her back to sleep. She has 2 naps a day of around 30-40 minutes, sometimes up to 90mins in the afternoon if she's very tired.
DH has tried to settle her when she wakes a coule of times, but she just gets very worked up and ended up committing all over him last time he tried.
Co-sleeping wouldn't work for us because DH sleeps very heavily yet tosses and turns bouncing all over the bed all night, often squashing me, and DD just gets hyperactive when I've tried bringing her in with us in the mornings.
Overall I think DD still needs a bit of milk overnight. She's not very big and takes a fairly decent amount of milk during the night. But I also need to get a stretch of sleep longer than 2 hours. She has slept for stretches of up to 9 hours on 3 or 4 occasions, so I know she's capable of sleeping for longer than she does.

So, how do I get her down to 1-2 wakings per night?

Do you feed her every time she wakes? Could you decide on two times you're happy to feed her, say 11 and 3, and settle her another way for the other times? Hopefully she'll then start sleeping through the other wake ups if she isn't getting milk.

When she wakes I listen to see if she will settle by herself (usually not) then go in & try to soothe her, but she just starts climbing up the side of the cot, crying, so I lift her out and she wriggles herself around to try & latch on or starts thumping me until I feed her. :(

Could you send your partner in to her the times that you don't want to feed her?

We discovered the lullaby function on our baby monitor, which can be switched on remotely (i.e. from our bed, using the parent unit!) - this sometimes magically sends DS back to sleep. I think it works because we haven't been in - if I went in and switched some music on and then left again he would get upset, but this seems to work 50% of the time.

Oooh, Beela - good tip, might try that one.

Bagel - perhaps try not picking her up when you don't intend to feed. So at, say, 11 and 3, pick her up, feed her, pop her back.

Any other waking just lie her down, smooth the covers over her, rub her chest, stroke downwards on bridge of nose and say shhh, shhh. She'll tantrum I suspect but once she realises you're only there to soothe and not to provide food, she might be less inclined to wake.

I assume she eats some solids and is drinking plenty of milk in the day?

Thanks HandMini. She's ok with solids, but not great. I'm BFing her three times a day routinely plus on demand. She hasn't been looking for any extra feeds lately. She's increased from below the 0.4th centile line at birth to the 9th at 10 months, so I'm happy enough with the total amount she's getting.
She goes 4-5 hours between feeds in the daytime, I just wish she could manage it at night again.

Wow, well done for getting her up the centiles like that. I'm afraid I don't have much more wisdom to add, but I did find that restricting the amount of milk I offered at night led to fewer night wakimgs