Cords - so pleased to see you've cracked it. I am well on the way to cracking it, though not quite there yet. Persist with the b/feeding AM, it was AGONY with both mine when they were really tiny as they both had small mouths and couldn't latch properly. Did laugh when you described the state of your nipples. All the nerve endings in mine died out a long time ago... Try using breastmilk as a healing salve, it is fantastic. Once child has finished its piercing sucks, squeeze a bit more b/milk out and smear over sore nipples. Leave to dry in the fresh (freezing cold) air. I found it worked better than any cream.
Re the magical 'settling your child to sleep' - me and cords had quite a long chat about it a few weeks ago. It's a nightmare getting it right. If I had a third child (no way) I would watch him/her very carefully in the first few weeks and as soon as s/he looked drowsy, would put them down in their bed to sleep. That way they would 'learn' to go to sleep by themselves. But if you have a colicky baby, lord knows how you do that as mine used to scream his head off if you put him down. I did cc with my first dd at about 7 months and then again at 11. Will not leave it so long with ds...
What I do with him (now 5 months) is a mixture of stategies. I rouse him before I put him down so he knows that he is going into his cot and not falling asleep at tit. If he won't go to sleep after a few minutes, I try patting his back and/or putting on his musical box which he now associates with sleep. What else? I leave him to scream when all else fails. This one is hard, especially when they are very young, but I find that sometimes nothing else works. I do a bit of patting and then leave him to scream, patting, leave to scream etc and eventually he falls asleep again. Can take A LONG TIME but actually, in the last week or two, he seems to have got the message and will only grumble sometimes for a few minutes, or at the most cry for 5-10 minutes.
At the moment, am trying to cut out the one night feed he is still getting. Giving this apparently, rather than sending a hungry baby back to sleep, is actually causing a not terribly hungry baby to wake up because that's what he's used to doing. According to Dr Ferber, whose excellent book on children's sleep I have just bought myself. This dropping of the feed is proving to be difficult... Will end up doing a Ferber cc thing in the next couple of weeks if we haven't managed to persuade him out of it by then. Then, hopefully, into his big sister's room by the time he's six months (and sleeping merrily through the night). Wish the same could be said of her, but that's another thread altogether.
Anyway, good luck. When you do the controlled crying, and you feel like the meanest mummy in Christendom, try and hang on to the fact that it DOES WORK and that you will be a better mother to your kids if you have had a fairly good night's sleep.