Sorry, composed that in another app before pasting and it lost my patagraphs!!
Here it is again formatted.
I was where you are now around 2 years ago. It was fucking awful. Bottle refuser, dummy refuser, would wake every 50 minutes through the night so 6-9 wakings was average. I was on ny knees with exhaustion.
His day naps were 20 minutes or so. He could stay awake for 9 hours straight. Even HV were stumped. One gave bad advice: if he's hungry enough he'll take a bottle.
He went 16 hours refusing a bottle. Sixteen hours without food or liquid at four months. He was hysterical. I gave in eventually and offered boob.
I felt as you feel now. Not all the time of course, but the depths of despair are deep indeed.
First of all, your baby's sleeping is NOTHING YOU ARE DOING WRONG. That needed caps as I cant emphasise it enough. I tried to figure out where I was going wrong compared to everyone else with ds1 but now that I've had 2 more dc I realised sleep is their own. Dc2 was so textbook and like a 'normal baby' that what my nct buddies used to say about their babies' ways suddenly made sense and dc3 was laughably easy. Slept easily and in long chunks from an early age. Nothing I did wny different.
- He will grow out of this. In fact ds1 became an easy bedtime and night sleeper and I was getting more sleep than many at the 14m mark. No hassle getting him to sleep and no wakings in the night.
- Insisting on a full night's sleep because he has a day job is not reasonable. Sorry but it's not. Millions of parents go to work on broken sleep. Routinely so.
American women not entitled to any paid maternity leave and paltry annual leave allowance, or women like me whose maternity leave ends before baby sleeps through. We get up and go to work on the 7th shitty night in a row. You CAN function so your DH must stop being a baby about this. At the very LEAST he can agree to take the baby off you for settling if it's after 5am. Many many people get up at 5 to catch their train to london in my neighbourhood. It sucks but its part of being a grown up. They do it every day for years and im sure of those commuters, some have small children waking them, too.
You have come to rely on the boob to settle ds because it works but he cant possibly NEED milk an hour since last feed. He's not a newborn anymore and your milk should be established now. Dh will learn to settle ds by other means (be that jiggling, pacing, swaying, taking him out in a baby carrier - all the things formula feeding parents must do because you can't make up bottles as easily as whipping out a nipple).
He will learn what works and, if your ds is anything like mine, will soon settle more easily for dh than for mum with the boobs. My ds would go to bed no problem as a unless it was me trying to settle him without boob.
I cant say what will work for you but here is what did and didnt work for me:
At 4 and a half months we, in desperation, tried sleep training. Ferber type method. Disastrous. Seriously, don't do it. We gave up after it became apparent he becomes hysterical if crying and then can sleep even less.We (that is to say I, as it was still boob or bust) soldiered on.
Then at around 6m we made the rule that if it has been less than 4 hours since last feed, dh does it. Baby is none of my business.That one thing improved my sleep IMMEDIATELY. I went to bed having fed ds and felt so free, so off duty for the first time, I fell into the deepest sleep I had for months. It would be dh going in 50minutes from now. Hurrah!
Thay first night, I woke after 4 hours of deep sleep and dc was crying. I went in to feed him and went back to bed, skipping at all that sleep and knowing I now had another 4 hours of off duty time.
The little fucker chose that night to do two 4 hr blocks dor the first time so, dh didn't even have to get up!! And the followingel night? Slept through! Fortunately those two nights were fluke and dh got to experience my normal nights for himsrlf after that.Even waking up and hearing the baby cry left me better rested if I was not the only one getting up to settle him each time.
Staying in bed hearing someone else settle him 6x was better than doing it all myself 4x. Men who whine , 'well he wakes me up too' don't appreciate this difference.
At ten months we tried sleep training again using pupd method and dh did it, and it worked quite well. Hed get cuddled by dh until drowsy and then put in the cot. Dh would pick him up and repeat. Ds became a decent sleeper but only for dh at first.
There are times in the night when you need to have your baby taken away from you so that his cries are not all yours to fix. dh needs to be a parent at night too, just like millions of other working parents have to just before going in to work. And it WILL get better. The above are just needed to see you through the next few months until it does.