DD will be 11months next week. Her sleep has been slowly declining basically her whole life. She slept through from 6 weeks to 4 months them started waking once a night. By 7 months it was twice a night. At 10 months (3 weeks ago) she got a bad cold and since then even though she's better about half the time she'll be up every two hours. This week, on the bad nights, she's also started waking up earlier, like at 4:30 to 5:30 instead of 6:00 to 6:30.
Her daytime sleep is okay. Usually an hour and a half sometime before lunch and then an hour in the afternoon (awake again no later than 4). However she will only nap on or next to me/DH or in the pram. She's always been like this with day sleep, even when her night sleep has been good.
In the evenings she usually goes to sleep on the couch with us between 19:00 and 20:00 (I give her a breastfeed then a dummy and soft music so she has a little routine). At 9:30 we take her upstairs, change her and give her a final breastfeed in the darkened bedroom with white noise playing. I try to put her into the crib before she's asleep but she's so used to the routine she just passes out cold on my boob half the time. Gettig her to go to bed is not the problem. She always goes to bed really well.
The problem is she wakes up a lot at night. About half the time she's up around midnight. I try to get her back to sleep without feeding her and manage it about half the time. Then she's always up at about 2:30 and I feed her. Now her new trick is getting up about 4:30 and refusing to go to sleep without a LOT of work, if at all, when previously she was easy to resettle.
She is breastfed when I'm around (I work 3 days) and has bottles of expressed milk and formula when I'm not. She eats three meals a day but no snacks in between. DH and I work on opposite days to avoid childcare costs. She is still in our room and can't be moved yet as work on her room is scheduled for December. Its a tiny house so nowhere else we could put her.
I don't like the idea of controlled crying. She's wilfull and I'm worried she'll thrash in the cot and hurt herself. I've also heard it's hard to do when you're in the same room. We don't have a shared weekend so the first awful few nights will have to be done on someone's work night. And finally I just don't know if I'm strong enough to leave her wailing.
I could night wean but that's gonna result in just as many tears so I might as well go all in if I'm gonna do it.
Honestly in an ideal world she'd go back to just one or two wakings. I can handle that and it might help with my milk supply since I often have to skip day feeds (though if she naturally stopped nursing at night I'd be fine with that).
I want to just wait it out but I'm worried it'll just keep getting worse not better.
Does anyone have positive stories about waiting it out or am I fooling myself?