Six month old still waking every hour

[zchrfawright]

My second child just won't sleep longer than 2 hours in one go,. Ebf ds1 til he was 2. Ds2 now six months and still up every hour or so in the night to feed back to sleep. I'm completely exhausted. No energy to look after toddler. He has started on purée fruit and veg in the day because he literally seems so hungry and tries to eat toddlers food already. Ds1 wasn't interested in food at all, only boob. Food doesn't seem to help him sleep though. Help!

I think it's probably more a sleep association rather than being hungry. My DS is 8 months and we've only just started getting longer stretches. What helped immensely was

1. Putting him in his own room. I didn't hear every snuffle or small moan between sleep cycles so didn't leap up to quickly feed him. The first 2 nights were hell going back and forth across the landing every 45 minutes but a massive improvement since.

1. For a while between 6-7ish months he let me gradually start the process of stopping feeding to sleep. I used to lie on my bed with him and as he fell asleep I would unlatch him. Cue moaning. So relatch. Rinse and repeat until he was asleep - had to relatch probably 30+ times at first!!

Anyway, despite point 2, he got a horrible cold shortly after and I had to resort to feeding him to sleep again for all naps and bedtime. However he is still sleeping for longer stretches (7h is his record!) so I'm inclined to say it's largely developmental.

Do you have a partner who can try to resettle him at all in the night? He will probably kick up a fuss at first but may help break the association of searching for the breast to get back to sleep. Every hour is a killer, I've been there so truly sympathise.