DS has been a pretty and sleeper since 4 months (not wonderful before tbh), but now at 11 months old I am feeling desperate and like I'm failing, doing something wrong or just not very good at this.
He often co slept from about 4-6 months, out of necessity, and for a while it really helped me feel a bit rested. But it stopped working, and actually all of our methods/techniques stopped working and seemed to wind him up and make him angry. So no feeding to sleep, cuddling, walking, rocking etc- he would push himself away from us and seemed genuinely frustrated at not being able to just sleep.
Soon after, I crashed our car and we decided to do controlled crying as we felt we had no other options. However I wanted to feed him midway through the night as I felt it was too harsh to suddenly go from snacking all night to nothing. Do we did and he slept through (no feed) on night 3... And never has since! We gradually ended up feeding him more and more again and things deteriorated. However, since cc he has been able to self settle well for naps and bedtime so that was something I thought.
So, 2 weeks ago we resolved to try again and offered water when he woke. It seemed to be working and we were getting longer stretches of sleep again, I was really pleased as it was a gentler process, found it much less upsetting to do. But the last 2 days/nights have been just awful. Naps have become a battle, he wakes after 15 mins and is then beside himself, clearly exhausted but furious if he is put back in his cot- or cuddled! Night time wake ups have become the same. He is seriously cross, whereas we had got to a point where if he woke, one of us would just go in and lie him back down and he would happily roll over and go back to sleep.
He has basically been up since 4, very very upset and angry.
What am I doing wrong? Stopped bf 3 months ago, drinks 3 bottles a day and eats pretty well. Not sure if anyone has had the energy to read all of this, thank you if so.