10mo's sleep has been terrible for 2 months - any explanations?

[Lovage]

I used to think my LO was a pretty rubbish sleeper - still feeding at 10.30pm and 2.30pm every night. But I now know that that was not at all bad - for the last 2 months it's been much worse

Not every night is terrible - about once a week he only wakes once in the time I'd be asleep, although when that once is is very variable which is harder to cope with. But most of the time he's waking at least twice and he keeps having these terrible nights where after about 2am he cries every 45 minutes (each sleep cycle, I presume). Or when he's up for an hour in the middle of the night. Or he'll have days where he howls as soon as he realises you're trying to put him down for a nap. Or when he won't go to bed in the evening and just cries - he used to have a really rock solid 7pm bedtime. He's always been difficult about naps but these don't seem to have got much worse, it's the nighttime really

I'm finding it particularly hard to get my head round cos it's not the same pattern - it's loads of different forms of sleeping much worse than he used to.

I'm not really looking for solutions (and certainly not cc ones) but any suggestions for what might be causing this? Or any similar experiences.

Some of the trouble has been teething and illness and at one stage I thought it was your standard 9 months sleep regression, but it's gone on too long for that. about a month ago I went back to work parttime and he started going to nursery 2 days a week but his sleep was bad before that.

Any ideas? It's so discouraging

my dd got into a cycle of bad sleeping at around 7-9mths, so i don't think its that uncommon. Hers was triggered by teething and illness and then I think it carried on because I went back to work part time, she's still more likely to wake on the days she's been away from me (she's 2 now - but don't worry most nights are fine now!) I resorted to controlled whingeing - i didn't want to let her cry, it upset me and she's sick if she cries alot, but i'd let her whinge a bit before I went to her, gradually letting her whinge for longer and settling her fully each time I went to her, it worked for us within a couple of weeks.

Thanks, that's really helpful! I hadn't thought about trying to relate it to the days he goes to nursery or the other day when he's with his Dad but not me. Not that I can do much about that if that is the problem... But I might feel a bit better if I knew what was causing it.

Alas we're already long past the stage of whinging it out - I suppose we occasionally do do very brief CIO for about 30 seconds and sometimes he settles himself in that time and sometimes his cries escalate in which case we go in and pick him up.

I can't believe before he was born I imagined he'd almost certainly be sleeping through by the time he was 4 months!