9 1/2 month old feed to sleep association at night

[cazzilla]

hello, my dd has never been a good sleeper, never been able to self soothe and I haven't been happy to let her cry,as she is a bit older and is getting more affected my lack of sleep, and i'm getting more tired as time goes on i'm wondering whether I should try and change things and if so how. during the day she naps in the sling or pushchair, never in her cot, and she only naps for half an hour at a time, generally 3 times a day. at night we do have a good routine, I know its just at the end where we have gone wrong: dinner, quiet play &/or cuddles with daddy, bath, massage, dressed for bed, story, feed, sleep, into cot. she always wakes up half an hour after shes gone down, she sits up in her cot and cries, I have to go in and have to feed her to get her back to sleep again. she then will go a bit longer before waking up again, but it gets harder and harder to settle her back to sleep, so she comes in with me in the middle if the night and we co-sleep, she still wakes up and wants to be fed sometimes but other times I can cuddle her back to sleep. my oh sleeps in the spare room as he has to be up at 4:45am and works long hours.this arrangement has worked up until now but my lo and me are getting very tired and grumpy and me and my oh want to sleep in the same bed again. I am reluctant to try cc or any variation of it, so does anyone have any other ideas? I have practised a lot of attachment parenting and don't want to deviate too much from that. any advice will be greatly appreciated.

I've been teaching my DD (5mo) to self-settle these past few weeks, with some success. Previously always fed to sleep. Now, I put her down awake. I'm doing a combo of pick-up-put-down and ssh-pat, I guess. Although I've found at nights she settles better if I don't pick her up and instead just rub her chest and say the same soothing phrase over and over again (in our case 'it's ok, it's ok, you're just going to sleep'). She will usually fall asleep within 20 minutes. However, I haven't really seen any reduction in night wakings - even after trying to totally separate last feed from putting her down (by feeding before bath) last night.

There are some suggestions in the No Cry Sleep Solution for gently breaking the feed-to-sleep association. And ssh-pat or pick-up-put-down are gentle as you stay with her. (However, I worry that I'm just building a new association of needing my hand on her chest to sleep).

So - no real answer here, I'm afraid. But there are ways to gently sleep train, rather than using CC or CIO, if that's what you want. I'm learning, however, that if they work at all they take time!