Seven month old sleep suddenly worse than ever

[Etherealhedgehog]

DD just turned seven months and has been a rubbish sleeper since the 4 month regression hit at 3.5 months. In the last week or so her sleep has been steadily getting worse than ever and all of the improvements that we had seen in the last couple of months seem to be slipping away.

She's capable of sleeping a good stretch of up to 3.5 hrs at the start of the night then tends to wake for a feed around 10.30 and it's downhill from there. She'll feed herself to sleep relatively quickly but as soon as I go to put her down she starts writhing around, wakes up and starts crying. I have to put her back on the boob and make a second attempt. When I finally put her down she will usually sleep for exactly 1.25 hrs (very rarely she will string two of those together) but then as the night goes on she gets harder and harder to put down. She often needs 1hr or more on the boob before she can be popped off without immediate protest, she will then do her waking up trick on being put down. Sometimes DD can then settle her but she'll inevitably be awake again within 15 mins and need more settling on the boob. This goes on, with more settling than sleep until I give up and DP takes her circa 6am (at which point she's usually been sleeping on me for at least an hour). Oh and she's also started waking up once or twice in the course of most evenings, which is an old habit we thought we had said goodbye to.

She's breastfed to sleep, which I know is part of the problem, and we are trying to tackle that. But what's really getting me down is that she's got so much worse recently. We had successfully used daylight savings to get her sleeping in her cot til 6 or later - now that's gone out the window. She used to sleep in stretches of 2-3 hrs, occasionally longer. Now they're almost all less than 90 mins. And the waking up as soon as I put her down hasn't been a thing since newborn days.

Does anyone have any ideas of what could be causing this? Could the 8-10 month regression be starting this early? She doesn't seem particularly plagued by separation anxiety in the day, but then it's COVID-times so there aren't many opportunities to tell... She's being treated for thrush (poor thing) but that appears to be getting better while this is getting worse. The most frustrating part is that just a few weeks ago, after her first tooth came through, she had a few nights that were her best since the 4 month regression started, waking just 2-3 times for a feed, so I know she can do it. But then a new bout of teething started and it's been constant downhill from there.

Help?

(apologies for crazy long post - trying to pre-empt obvious questions!)

Following as my 7.5 month old was sleeping very well and it's suddenly all gone to pot 😭

They have a second sleep regression normally around 8 months, tends to coincide with when they're starting to work up to crawling. I suspect your little one is starting the a tad early, I bet its just a phase and passes. When they reach a massive milestone it tends to distract them snd I guess there's a lot going on in their brains so it affects their sleeping xx

@sarahc336 thanks that's really interesting. I was thinking it was a bit too early (this started a couple of weeks ago, so before 7 months) but she's been working her way up to full crawling for a few weeks now so perhaps the timing is less off then. Hopefully this one is not as dire as the four month regression that we're still muddling our way through

If she's trying to crawl I bet anything it's just related to that, she just have a lot in her mind with learning 😂 good luck!!

Happened to us to 6-7 months. Absolute horror show, can’t count the wake ups, couldn’t be put down without waking etc. She also barely put on weight those few weeks despite feeding (back to sleep) constantly. Now at just over 7 months we’re back to two to three hour stretches and starting to think about getting her settling sorted which I wouldn’t do when I had no idea why the sleep was so bad! Hopefully yours will be there soon as well.

@jessetta28 this sounds like exactly what we're going through (and yep, I've stopped counting wake-ups, though the inability to be put down makes that number quite misleading anyway!) Good to hear you came out the other side. If that was 6-7 months did it last closer to a month or more like a couple of weeks? (I ask with a frantic look in my eye, having already told DP I can't imagine making it to Friday like this, let alone living through a month of it)

I’ve just looked at my tracker and on and off it lasted about a month... we did have some ok nights in that as well thoigh although did nothing different! She also started refusing her last nap - a couple of weeks later and she absolutely wants it again. It just felt like she really didn’t want to sleep much for a while.

@jessetta28 urgh. Hoping that we've been in it for a couple of weeks already so maybe only a couple more to go (every month brings a new definition of crap sleep so it's hard to keep track!) That's interesting about the nap - we are definitely at transition time. Generally nap three is only a 15 min catnap now and she does often refuse it, though that leads to some pretty grumpy bedtimes Good luck with the attempts at self-settling. After much trying and failing with a gentle method we had been planning to try something new starting this weekend but, like you, my gut feeling is that may be bonkers when her sleep is this disturbed (but then I find myself wondering how much of this is because she doesn't self-settle at bedtime... Who knows!!!)