10 months sleep hell

[Anna783426]

My little girl is nearly 10 months old and for the last 3 months sleep has been a special kind of hell, daytime and nighttime.

I know comparison is the thief of joy but I hear of babies her age having 2-3 hours sleep a day; we only ever get 30 minutes out of nap, she wakes up, stands in her cot and is still tired but awake and won't go back to sleep. Even in the buggy it's 45 minute maximum. So on an average day she gets an hour sleep across a day, on a good day maybe an hour and a half, bad day 30 minutes. There was a magical time at around 6 months when she slept through and napped like a dream. Those days are gone.

Nightime she has bad nights and worse nights - on the worse end of the scale it's up every 45 minutes to an hour. Good night we get a 2 hour stretch. She can settle in her cot, with me holding her tummy gently so she doesn't roll and stand up, but as soon as she wakes a little she rolls and is standing up. She's in a dark room, with white noise, in a sleeping bag. Last night after waking at 10.30pm I spent an hour trying to get her to go back to sleep with no joy. I brought her into bed with me and she was asleep but I just don't love cosleeping. I don't know if that's selfish of me but I find it more difficult to sleep, and she still wakes every couple of hours I just don't have to get out of bed to settle her.

I know she is a baby and I need realistic expectations but I don't want to look back on this time and just remember being a sleep deprived mess. Standing up seems to be the proper distraction from sleep, which is not a new skill, she's done it using the bars of the cot for three months or so.

Partner is present but she struggles to settle with him and in all honestly i do just step in to avoid prolonging it more than necessary. I'd be lying if I said he understood how sleep deprived I am and how difficult I'm finding it. She's not waking to feed every time, she's breast fed and eating a good amount of solids.

Mainly I am just so tired and want more than anything for someone to tell me what to do to magically fix it. Anyone?

Sleep getting difficult at the pulling to standing phase is quite usual. It is much more difficult to solve when baby doesn't have independant sleep habits already established- as seems to be the case for you. So to answer your main question in it's simplest terms:

Mainly I am just so tired and want more than anything for someone to tell me what to do to magically fix it. Anyone?

The question is - are you ready too?

Because teaching your baby to sleep independently will be brutally hard work. If you're not ready to give it your full focus then it is better to find ways to maximise sleep rather than sleep train.

Maximising sleep would be best solved by bringing the cot into your bedroom, removing one side and mixing cosleeping with sidecar cot use - for both daytime naps and night sleep. This won't teach independant sleep quickly (but could do in the longer term), but will help you get more sleep.

Teaching independant sleep - well, depends on your parenting style. I would do a gradual withdrawal process rather than leaving baby to cry alone.

The pulling to standing thing is fairly routine and normal at this age. Start by stopping lying baby down yourself. Assuming she can physically go from standing to sitting to lying down, then put baby in the cot stood up (every time), tap mattress and get baby to lie down unaided. Playing instruction-following games during the day helps with this - babies are universally keen to please and show how clever they are.

It then becomes a matter if being consistent and relentlessly repeativive about it. Every time baby gets up, get them to lie back down. If fussy, lift out of the cot, settle then put back in standing up and start again. Just keep going over and over and over with the same thing. Your expectation should be baby will lie down, quietly. From that point, boredom happening sleep.

I reeeeaally feel the pain in this post! I could have written it when mine was 10 months. Other than giving her lots of practise to stand and pull up during the day, I don't have any actual advice - I never could sleep train my daughter and leaving her just ended up in hysteria rather than boredom.

So many things are happening in their brains and bodies in the first couple of years, by responding to her you're giving her security and safety. You're doing amazingly. Even if you decide to do nothing, this will pass, and sleep will come.

I also feel your pain and could have written this at 10 months. My DD is now 15 months and at 13 months I made the hard decision to sleep train. I never left her I was there the whole time but I simply kept gently laying her back in the cot everytime she woke up and did not budge. There were tears and it was horrible.it took a little longer for her than most say (not the magic three nights) but now she wakes max twice in the night. Sometimes I hear her stand up throw her cuddly toy out the cot but if I don't respond she'll go back to sleep without crying or fussing she simply knows it's time to sleep and feels safe in her cot now. I vowed never to sleep train but personally I'm so glad I did. DD has got parents who argue less and do more with her because they sleep more and better sleep herself. I totally understand people who don't want to do it though but that was my 'fix'

laying her back in the cot everytime she got up
That was a typo but I've just read FATEs post and probably would have done it the way she suggested if I'd have read it before rather than kept laying DD back. Either way relentlessly repetitive and consistent was definitely the key.