DD is nearly 12mo and has always been fed to sleep. However, for the past month or so feeding to sleep at bedtime has stopped working - she's just wide awake and bouncing around the cot after her bedtime bf! I kind of feel like this would be a good time to start some very gradual withdrawal type of help to get her to sleep more independently, with the hope that maybe this would eventually help our frequent night wakings too.
I get that you sit by the cot and are quite boring and non-interactive until she falls asleep, but my problem is she is so lively once she's put in the cot (even if she's been really quite sleepy after her bf). As soon as she goes in her cot, she sits right up and is crawling round the cot, pulling at me, sometimes tired crying, sometimes quite content, but never sleepy. I try intermittently lying her back down again, but she just bounces straight back up! Eventually, after 45mins-1 hour she'll be tired enough for me to pat her down to a sleepy position and then I can ease off the patting and she does fall asleep on her own.
If I leave the room she straight away goes into proper full-on distressed crying and I'm not going to leave her to cry.
Is she just not tired enough at bedtime? Changing bedtime either later or earlier has no effect. I don't think she is particularly over-stimulated - we have a calm bath-boob-story-bed routine and it's hard to see how I could make it any calmer. Maybe it's her daytime nape - she has 30-45 mins in the morning and then 1.5-2 hours in the afternoon, waking around 3:15, but I have tried moving it forwards so she's awake by 2:30, but that doesn't seem to change bedtime.
Anyone got any bright ideas on what might help?!