Ginger: thinking of you . Hope you get some answers soon.
For the newbies, here are my waffly thoughts
sleep probs often coincide with developmental stgages. There's a great website called Ask Moxie which has a lot on this: www.askmoxie.org/. There's a summary of what she calls sleep regressions here: moxie.blogs.com/askmoxie/2006/02/qa_what_are_sle.html
I completely agree with her philosphy that there isn;t much you can do to get a young baby to sleep in teh 'right' way. Even if you do (and I've been there spending hours getting DS to self-settle at 4 months or whatever) it invariably goes out the window when they get to the next stage. the hardest phase for me was when DS started standing up (at about 5/6 months) which was when we started co-sleeping and I gave up on the sleep training because nothing was working! DS was waking around every 2 hours (sometimes more, sometimes less) more or less from birth to about 14 mo. I think he's quite a hardcore case, though. At 15 mo we tried CC to get him to sleep a) in the cot and b) without night feeds and it worked really quickly, so I think it was the right time for us. He now sleeps through more or less, though he still wakes up at 6ish or even earlier.
In summary, I'd say that waking lots is normal, esp in the first year, and there is no, NO one way to address this. You try different things and take wqhat works for you. I couldn't have tried CC any earluer than 15 mo, but others have and it's worked well. Others have kept with co-sleeping and other AP techniques and their babies are sleeping through without any other action, so they're all different!
The other thing I would say is try (ha!) not to stress too much over things. If you find you;re dreading the evenings because of the struggle to get your DC to sleep, that you're not sleeping yourself even if your baby does cos you are waiting for them to wake, and if you're worrying and thinking and planning about sleep strategies all the time, really try to step back and get a break, whether it's co-sleeping, napping during the day, leaving the baby with your partner or your mum for a night... the line between sleep deprived and depressed is really, really fine and I think we've all wavered over it at some point.
Gosh, that was a spiel! Oh, and The Blog is here )if you want to contribute, fantastic, email me at personal not business at gmail dot com (no spaces)