Apologies in advance for the essay! I am hoping for some advice on sleeping & wanted to give all the context 😊
My 11 month old DS has never been a great sleeper & used to wake up regularly in the night for a feed. But we did some gentle sleep training a few weeks ago & things improved - cut out night feeds & encouraged him to self settle - and he slept through the night a couple of times.
Then he got ill & was quite disturbed - again, fine, I thought to be expected & cuddled / settled him as necessary. But over the last week or so all of this seems to have fallen apart. He has started waking after 3-4 hours sleep & screaming - and no matter what I do I just can’t seem to settle him. There is zero chance of settling him in the cot as he gets more & more worked up. Picking him up & cuddling him tends to calm him briefly but he then starts flinging himself around in my arms & getting very agitated. Bringing him into bed with us is the same. He is clearly desperate to sleep as he closes his eyes & tries to get comfortable but something is bothering him & I can’t for the life of me work out how to help. I’ve tried calpol, nurofen, teething granules, bonjela, anbesol, feeding him, cuddling him, changing nappy, getting him up & calming him with a story / distracting him with tv (obviously not all at the same time!). But each time we are up for 2-3 hours, with him screaming for most of that time until he exhausts himself & goes back to sleep. Last night he was awake from 10pm until 12.15am, then again from 3am until 5.40am. DH and I are SO tired we can barely function. So I am reaching out to the good people of Mumsnet - does anyone have any suggestions?? Anything else I can try? Any experiences of something similar? If I knew what was wrong I’d at least know how to help him - but at the moment I just feel so helpless when he’s distressed :-(
Other bits of info to prevent dripfeeding - he has just started nursery 4 days a week (this is week 3) as I have returned to work. I’ve also just stopped breastfeeding him (dropping to morning & evening feeds only meant I just didn’t have any milk left) so he’s on oat milk because he has an allergy to cow’s milk. Take-up of the oat milk has been mixed but he’s now much more enthusiastic about it as I’ve started warming it for him. Last night he had 200ml before bed, 150ml at around 11.30pm, 180ml at 5am & then another 180ml at 7.30am (middle of the night ones were desperate attempts to get him to go back to sleep). I don’t know if any of this has had an impact.
Please help!!