Help would be massively appreciated! Our second child, a gorgeous, active and 97th percentile 10 month old baby boy, is also a terrible sleeper.
As a result we attempted to sleep train him a few weekends ago with controlled crying with great success. By the end of the weekend, he slept from his dream feed at 11:30 through until 6pm! Great we thought, we've cracked it!
Unfortunately over the course of the next few weeks he started getting gradually worse again until the current state which is that he keeps waking up and crying out during the night.
The problem is that because controlled crying worked with him, when we lie him back down in his cot (He is typically stood up and crying when we get to him) he goes straight back to sleep, so no opportunity to 'train' him. We then get back into bed and try to get back to sleep. Alas, 15-20 minutes later he wakes again typically just when we are either drifting off to sleep or have gone to sleep.
It's like the little git has somehow absorbed and is putting into practice sleep depravation torture tactics! This isn't helped by our 5 year old girl either being woken up by him or waking him up!
Putting him into bed with us so we can get some sleep, unlike with our first, doesn't work as he then gets excited and decides to crawl on us/off the bed/grab our faces or otherwise act like its the morning!
Only option that seems to be open to us is to not react when he wakes up ie not go in to lie him back down, and start the controlled crying without the initial visit from us. Refer back to the waking his sister sentence above for the problem with this option though.
On a typical night like last night, he woke up 4 times between going down at 7:30pm and the dream feed at 11:00pm yesterday evening and a further 8 times during the night after the dream feed before we gave up at 5:30am in the morning and got up with him.
Any ideas or suggestions would therefore be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Neil (An increasingly frazzled husband to an increasingly emotional wife!)