Going slowly insane with 15 month old's sleeping - help!

[amyboo]

DS2 is 15 months old. He's never been the world's best sleeper, but had started sleeping through OK until the start of April. Since then, he's waking anywhere from 3-5 times a night. DH and I both work full time and we're starting to find the lack of sleep really tough now after 10 weeks of this :(

A bit of background: He was 9 weeks premature, but has already caught up developmentally and weight/size wise. He goes to bed (usually awake) at about 7.15pm and wakes around 6am. He has one nap of about 2.5-3 hours around midday. Eats well, drinks his milk well, and is VERY active in the daytime. The paediatrician thinks he's getting night terrors, as he kind of semi wakes rolling around his cot and screaming. He often wakes up pretty much bang on every 2 hours, which would tend to suggest night terrors too. He usually settles fine at bedtime, but will just scream and shout out frequently throughout the night, often also standing up in his cot. Although never seems that tired in the morning when he wakes up.

I really don't know what to do with him. The paediatrician said to try and leave him to cry a bit, but it doesn't seem to help, and if we leave him too long he gets hysterical which ends up waking up DS1 (4.5). We have some good results by patting and shushing him, but doing that 4-5 times a night is exhausting. Does anyone have either a) any experience with this kind of sleeping madness, or b) some useful suggestions of how to fix his sleep? I'm tempted to see if we can get an appointment at the paediatric sleep clinic at the hospital where he was born, as I'm wondering if there's something else we're not noticing...

I'm so tired I don't know how I'm even managing to type :(

Hello, yes this sounds absolutely familiar to me. My DD was exactly the same - up every 1.5-2 hours a night ....absolutely the worst sleeper in the world until we did something about it at 15 months old. I got a lot of advice to leave her to cry but my intuition said that it wasn't the answer plus she's so strong willed if even left for a minute she could make herself sick and later climb out her cot.

Anyway to cut a long story short we found lots of answers to the sleep problem - we discovered a big link with what she ate and her sleep - and found gluten, sugar, cow's milk and any preservative, additive, colouring etc. to be a problem even though she had no other symptoms. She was a very restless sleeper before and would roll around in the cot so much she would have bruises on her head but this settled down once her diet was sorted. She was also a very bad teether and calpol didn't work long enough so we had to find alternative solutions. Also she suffered with very vivid dreams and would sleep talk etc.
I've blogged about our sleep solutions to help other mums - if you're interested here's our story - mydaughterwontsleep.com/about/
and also my post on foods to help your child sleep better - mydaughterwontsleep.com/2014/05/18/sleep-inducing-foods-for-you-and-your-child/

Sleep deprivation is the absolute worst because you don't have enough energy to enjoy your child and I used to get really resentful of that.

It only took about 1 month to sort it all out, then my DD slept about 11-12 hours straight. Good luck with it all. xxx

Thanks for your response. The thing is though, he was sleeping OK ish until April - just waking every so often for a drink of water (he drinks a lot of water throughout the day too) or because he'd lost his dummy. He also has a really good diet - he eats pretty much everything and we only make home made food - no processed rubbish or sugary snacks or anything. I really don't think it's food related because in fact he had reflux quite badly until he was weaned early at 5 months. Once he was weaned he was a much happier baby... He also doesn't have any trouble going to sleep, either at bedtime or at naptime. It's just the staying asleep throughout the night....