Our baby is 8 months old and will only go to sleep if we rock him or breastfeed him to sleep. Once asleep, we cannot move him without waking him (even if we wait for deep sleep - limp arms, mouth relaxed, etc). Therefore, feeding him to sleep has to be done in our bed and then I have to slowly extricate myself from his clutches without waking him up or having creaking bed wake him up! I want to be able to keep doing this until he learns to self-soothe and self-settle (when will this happen!?) but the problem is that doing this several times a night has already resulted in my left shoulder freezing up for the last 2.5 months so that I cannot lift my arm above my head. If this happens to the right arm, I feel that we are heading for sleep training. If he ends up crying (and I am almost certain he will), my instinct is that I want to stay with him so that I do not feel like I have abandoned him. My question is therefore: Is it possible to have my baby learn to self-settle whilst crying in bed and I will be lying next to him, comforting him/cuddling him?
I ask because most sleep training seems to involve leaving the baby for varying lengths of time. Is there a problem or flaw with my plan? DH wonders if we do it this way, we will have to do it again to train him to sleep in cot as well and he does not want to put him through two extended periods of crying. I feel that if he learns to go to sleep in bed with us, this will be a valuable life-skill and once learned he will not have to re-learn it! Me lying next to him the whole time will relieve my guilt at him crying (but will not do much to stop the crying unfortunately...)