1 year old has evil cold and sleep is fubar - helphelphelp!

[Babababababybel]

Hi there,

My little girl has just turned 1 and the poor mite got a stinking cold just in time for her birthday! It's playing havoc with all our sleep and I'm really worried about the longer term implications.
We started a bedtime routine that works for her (using the timed comforting approach, pink noise, lullabies, etc) when she was about 6 months old and once she got used to that she was self soothing and sleeping in her cot in her room really well. Until just recently she was sleeping through the night most of the time and we were all super happy.
Now it's all gone to crap and she is taking forever to fall asleep, we have false starts before she'll actually go in the cot without rioting and her sleep is all interrupted. It's been very bad at about 4.30/5am a couple of times and DH has been so desperate to make the crying stop that he's brought DD into our bed. Which neither of us ever wanted to do and I'm so worried that she's going to expect it more and more and will refuse her cot altogether.
I'm confused because I've read that babies won't self soothe when they're ill, teething, in pain etc but there doesn't seem to be advice about how you should comfort them and help them sleep without totally undermining their usual routine and everything they've learned about how to get themselves to sleep. We really don't want to make a rod for our own future backs here. Plus are you supposed to just hold them all night because that seems totally out there to me?
I'm sure I can't be the only person to have these worries so any constructive thoughts would be welcome!

"timed comforting approach" - Is that controlled crying?

how you should comfort them and help them sleep

To answer your questions, if my nearly one year old was crying, I would be next to her comforting her. I can't get my head around not comforting a baby, any baby. That seems quite odd to me.

All babies need help to get to sleep, they are likely to until school age. But that doesn't have to be hands-on help. White noise, comforter toys, dummy, singing, just being present in the room with them - all of these are ways to help baby feel secure enough to sleep.

I just do what it takes to get 9mo DD the most sleep possible when she is ill, and then when she's better things go back to normal. I will be honest we rarely bring her in with us as she's such a fidget. But nothing's off the table - if she's sleep deprived it'll take longer for her to get better and we all suffer longer. I'm sure at 1 year old her routine and sleep associations are well in place, she'll bounce right back into them. You're very lucky if this is the first time her routine's been disrupted through illness!

Bear in mind that she may be having difficulty coughing and breathing with a stuffy nose, so she may want to be held upright rather than laid out in a cot.

You seem rather over-focused on the long-term effects on her sleep rather than her short-term needs with the illness.

Short term needs may take a bit to get over but what do you do? 1 year old DS was night weaned and dos on occasion sleep through but a cold and two teeth hit and it was up every hour and co sleeping and now he still wants to feed twice a night 3 weeks later. But there's no way I couldn't have held him as he sobbed half the night and fed him and comforted him and I was definitely comfier in my bed with him while this happened. There will be many sleep upsets in the future so I just do what needs doing.

Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts. I'm getting that the only way is to be pragmatic and do what has to be done to make DD feel better.
I may not have come across this way but naturally I'm just as concerned about my baby's cold and the discomfort she is suffering as I am about disruption to her routine. If I could swap places with her I would! The thing is that getting to sleeping through the night stage was down to really hard work all round. I don't take it for granted at all and I think that the fact that DD has mostly slept well these last few months has helped her immune system out.
She hasn't slept very well when we brought her into our bed which is another reason why I'm not keen on doing it. Fortunately she is starting to feel a bit better now, we found that lavender spray in the room and dressing her in an extra later or 2 is making her feel cosier at night too.
Moggle thanks for the words of reassurance re sleep associations!

Layer even. Damn you autocorrect.