Teaching a 9mo to settle herself...how?

[CoffeeChocolateWine]

I need some help with my 9 month old DD. It was all going so well...really good natured happy baby and she started sleeping through the night at about 10 weeks old. That lasted until she was about 6.5 months old and then went pear-shaped. Every single night since then she’s had broken nights...sometimes (rarely) it might just be once; sometimes it about 5 times. The norm is 2 or 3 times at the moment. I posted about it a while back and everyone said it was the 6-8 month sleep regression and it will pass, but it’s been 3 months of terrible nights and I am broken I can’t cope with such little sleep anymore...I’m suffering from headaches, I get shaky, I can’t focus on things, I’m moody, irritable and I’m dropping balls all over the place.

I think the problem is that I got in the habit of feeding her to sleep, plopping her in the cot and she’d sleep like that till morning. Now she’s a bit older, she still falls asleep on me and goes straight into the cot but her mind is more active now so she stirs during the night and now can’t settle herself without me.

I have 2 older DC but they were both bottle fed from very early on so this was never an issue as I did sleep training with them when they were about 4 months and they were able settle themselves really well after that. But this time she’s not having any of it...she just screams and thrashes around if I put her in the cot awake.

What shall I do? I don’t want to leave her to cry. Is there a gentler way I can teach her to fall asleep by herself?

Anyone?

I've never managed to get my babies sleeping through until they were ready (sorry), but could you go to be earlier, at least two or three nights a week?

*bed not be

Sounds good in theory but never happens. My evenings are when I’m most productive...all the stuff I don’t get done during the day gets done once the kids are in bed. And my DH works away a lot so if I don’t do it it doesn’t get done!

We were recommended the book 'teach your child to sleep' by our health visitor. It was amazing with lots of different suggestions for sleep issues. We chose the 'gradual withdrawal/ gradual retreat ' method. This involved gradually increasing the time between feeds in the night and going from feeding to sleep, to rocking to sleep, to holding to sleep, etc. It did involve sone crying (but I was always with him) and did take a good while but it was effective ( going from waking every 1-2 hours to sleeping 12 hours!). Each step took a couple of days and we increased the time by 15minutes every few days.