Sorry, this is long...
My nearly 8mo DD has never been a good sleeper. Things are better now than they were (she was waking every 40-60 minutes for the first 4 months) but her sleep is erratic and unpredictable, and we're just at a bit of a loss of what to do.
She is formula fed, on prescription milk for cmpa, and eats 3 good meals a day. She tends to have one bottle overnight (sometimes two), this can be any time from 10pm-2am. We've tried to not feed her at the earlier time, but sometimes once she starts crying she just won't settle, so we have to do it early.
I am not expecting her to be sleeping through yet (although of course it would be nice!), and if it was just one or two feeds I was up for, I'd cope fine. But she regularly wakes and needs settling at other times on top, and frequently wakes at 4/5am and can cry for well over an hour before going back off.
This is the routine we aim for: up at 6am, nap 8.30/9 until 10am, nap 12.30-2.30, then we do dinner at 4.45/5pm, bath at 6 and final bottle before bed at 6.30pm. All times are ish.
The issues/questions we have are, as above, she is regularly waking at 4/5am and being impossibly difficult to resettle, and we don't know how to prevent this?
I've agonised over her nap times etc, but I can't see much I can change in that, particularly because I have to work around the school run.
When we put her down for her nap, she screams the house down. We don't feed to sleep, she gets put into the cot and into her sleeping bag, and she just goes ballistic. She will go off to sleep in about 5 minutes, but it's bloody torturous. We'd love for this not to happen but I don't know how?
And the wakings that aren't for a feeding. Why? How do we stop these?
We took her to a cranial osteopath when she was little, which to be honest didn't make loads of difference. We also paid a sleep specialist for advice, a plan and ongoing support, and she did help to improve things, but not as much as we'd hoped. Possibly because DD was only 4mo when we hired her, so was too young really to sleep train?
She does fall asleep independently (after all the screaming), sometimes she falls asleep on her bedtime bottle, sometimes not, doesn't seem to make a difference. We try not to lift her out of the cot when she wakes, we ssh and pat etc. We don't rush in when she cries out, so she does have the opportunity to get herself back off.
She doesn't have a dummy - we're considering offering her one to see if this helps, but if feels like a regressive step to do this?!
Her room is really dark (two blackout blinds and blackout curtains 😂) and we have white noise on and a lullaby bear. She has a teddy comforter, and we use the same putting down method every day, so the environment is consistent.
I'm also aware she's close to the 8m sleep regression, so if she's in that early it may be behind the worsening of things of late. She's nearly crawling, so developmentally this could be impacting too.
I know there's no magic fix, but honestly any suggestions to help would be amazing. Would you offer a dummy at this stage?! Any specific sleep training methods that we could try? Would you make changes to the nap times? Please. Thank you.