HELP! 11 month old not sleeping at night!

[quaium]

I'm at my wits end and very sleep deprived at the moment. My 11 month old doesn't sleep properly at night and it's driving me and my husband round the bend!

She is having three meals a day with snacks in-between and is being breastfed regularly. On most days she has two naps without any problems for about an hour or so. She is very active during the day and crawls around the house until she's tired.

She is sleeping in her own cot in our room.

She will go to sleep at night OK. Sometimes being breastfed or just being held. It's impossible to put her down in the cot if she is awake or even a tiny bit awake as she will just cry and get up.

The problem is she only sleeps for about an hour/two hours and then wakes up. When she wakes up she instantly cries and jumps up from her sleeping position to a standing position screaming at the top of her lungs.

We have tried to let her cry it out but she doesn't stop. She starts to cry louder and eventually gets so bad that her throat dries up. We have tried putting her back down to her sleeping positon but as soon as she's down she gets back up again. All the time crying.

She doesn't want anyone but me. If her dad picks her up she'll continue crying and tries to wriggle out of his arms to get to me. They spent the whole day together yesterday without me in sight, she was OK with him during the day/afternoon naps.

When I take her she seems fully wake. She doesn’t even want to lie down in our bed as she cries and just wants to roll around on me!

She eventually falls back to sleep with a little comfort from me or being breastfed but she will wake up again after an hour or so. She continues doing this through the night every hour or so hardly getting any sleep!

We have tried a bedtime routine... giving her a bath, reading her a book, getting her to turn the lights off and draw the curtains but nothing has helped. We've even let her cry it out but it gets to a stage where it's too much for her and for us!

What are we doing wrong? Does anyone have any advice on how we can help her to get a whole nights sleep?

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated!

Her sleep habits and associations now, at 11 months old, are established and set.

There is no magic wand that can be waved to have her sleeping well alone, quickly and with no fuss or upset.

She evidently had established you as her comfort - either being held by you or breastfed by you. Children need some form of comforter in order to sleep usually right through until school age. Some parents use comforter toys, dummies, thumb sucking, there are lots of comforters used. These are things that are established at a much younger age though and by the age of your daughter are very hard to change.

You are your daughters comfort and if you remove that comfort she is going to get very distressed, upset and cry a lot. She will find it very hard to sleep without your comfort.

So since you are now in this situation and it is very difficult to change things at this age, if it was me I'd just accept the situation and co-sleep until she grows out of it. At least this will get you both some sleep.

I would stop trying to fight it and change, and just focus on coping my co-sleeping. By the time she starts school she may be of an age then where you can bribe and cajole her out of the co-sleeping habit. Way too young for that yet though.

Sorry, maybe I should've added that she's only recently started acting like this. About a month or so now.

For the past 11 months she's been an angel. Even from about 3/4 months sleeping through the night. We've also been very careful not to ruin her sleeping habits.

This has suddenly started to happen and that's the confusing part and we're not sure why she's acting like this or how we fix it.

When younger, was she mostly breastfed just before sleep or breastfed to sleep?

It could be that the full tummy and cuddles from a breastfed are her sleep trigger. But the problem with this arises as baby gets older, is weaned and so breastfeeds are less about filling her tummy in the way they were when exclusively breastfed or on early solids.

It's not unusual for babies who easily fed to sleep in the first 6-12 months have trouble sleeping in later months because of it being much more difficult (reaching almost impossible) to reach milk drunk sleepiness.

Just an idea.