Help - 5.5 month old crying before sleep

[Elmoohboy]

My baby is almost six months old and started sleeping on her tummy (I rolled her onto her back but she kept rolling straight back again) two months ago. Ever since she started this going to sleep has become a nightmare.

Every single time this happens: after the bedtime routine of bath, pajamas, an attempt at a story (usually have to stop as she cries), I put her in her cot,feed her milk, she looks like she is almost asleep, rolls over, wriggles, gets up on her hands and knees and cries. She rolls around and Her cries get worse until she is inconsolable. It's almost like she can't get comfortable? She isn't comforted by anything I do. If I pick her up she pushes away, if I put my hand on her chest she wraps her legs around it and wrestles it. Eventually she accepts more milk and looks like she is about to falls asleep and then repeats the above. She will eventually fall asleep after 25-60minutes of the above. For every single nap and bedtime, so at least 2.5 hours of this a day.

I don't know what to do anymore. I have tried to feed her milk well before bedtime as maybe it is a milk issue but she refuses it even if there has been a long gap since her last feed. I have tried to put her down at the first sign of tiredness and also tried waiting until she is definitely very very sleepy. Always the same thing. The only exception is when we are out and she is in a sling or pram but even then there is often some crying but nowhere near as much.

I asked the health visitor and she said that some babies just cry a lot and there isn't anything I can do. I can't accept this - there must be a solution?
She used to have a dummy but we took it away a month ago as during her rolling around it fell out and would exacerbate her distress.

I am tempting by cc but I sort of do this anyway as I can't comfort her and often have to walk away for a break. Her crying escalates until the point that the only way I can stop her is by taking her into a different room to snap her out of it. She does this whether I am with her or not.

I'm not sure if it's relevant or not but she is a very active (even hyper?) baby who is well ahead of milestones. She is beautiful and I love her so much but she is a real handful. She never sits still and is either really happy and excited or really sad, she has no chilled out medium state apart from 5 minutes after a good sleep.

I'm at the end of my tether and would like to hear from anyone who has had a similar baby - how did they end up? And please does anyone have any suggestions for the crying before sleep issue?

Thanks in advance and sorry for the v long post.

We had a similar (less serious) issues with my son. He just gets angry and doesn't want to sleep. For the first nine months I ended up holding him until he fell asleep. We eventually realised that he just hated his cot. So I started putting him to sleep in our bed and then moving him. Now he is a year and a bit and just sleeps on a mattress in his own room with no problems. He lies down, settles himself and just falls alseep and doesn't really wake up more that twice a night (unless he rollsoff). As for sleeping on the tummy don't worry about that, once they are able to roll over by themselves (your little one seems to be able to do this very early) then they can get themselves out of any trouble. An option you may have to make the cot more pleasant is to switch to a more comfortable matress and to leave some toys in there so that your little doesn't find being in there so unpleasant. I would also recommend really boring musicy sounds like chanting or didgeridoo (this really helped with teaching our son to settle himself rather than being fed or cuddled to sleep).