Night Breast Feeding / Sleeping

[thisisreallyfunny]

My 11mo is torturing me. From birth I've been bfeeding on demand and this has been the case during the night too. She's never slept well and often wakes every 3-4hrs or so. Recently she's been waking every 30m/1hour and now won't settle unless she's on the boob. I've tried tapping her/shushing her but cries and she only settles when she's on the boob. Please someone tell me how I get out of this. Will she stop by her own accord or should I start doing something now? The sleep deprivation is slowly killing me. Thank you in advance

OP, I could have written this with both of my boys... the youngest was at this point just a few months ago.

We co sleep, and is got to the point where he would feed and roll away, barely waking me. I knew what he was doing and that he was safe but I managaed to drop back off very quickly.

Right now, he's less and less interested in boob and although he doesn't sleep through, he wakes maybe once or twice a night for a quick reassure then is back off to sleep

He's in our bed because, honestly, if he wasn't we would all be up all night. I'm picking my battles but of you overlook that he's not in his cot all night then yes, it does get easier

It's vile though, I feel for you. I try to remind myself that we will miss it when it stops although when it comes to the lack of sleep I'm not sure it applies

My DS was like this. We co-slept until he was 13 months. He would scream before every nap/bedtime and have to be rocked in arms to sleep. I eventually was so exhausted that we did some form of sleep training.

I didn't want him to "cry it out", so we did a gentler version that involved staying with him at first, rubbing his back etc. and then gradually building up to leaving the room. It was hard & time consuming, but so worth it. He's 15 months now, he goes in his cot and happily falls asleep within minutes and has started to (mostly) to sleep through.