10 month old. No end in sight!

[ExcitingTimes2021]

Well baby is 10 months. Always been a challenging sleeper. On top of only napping if held and waking frequently in the night she has now added a long 1 to 2 hour wake between 2 and 4am and starting the day before consistently before 6am to the mix. This just is killing me off now as Iv also gone back to work. I work long 12.5 hour shifts And I have to get up for work at 5.30 so a 2 hour wake until 4am on top of her other wakes just isn’t ideal at all.
I had made my peace with the fact that I can’t put her down for naps and that she is just a baby who wakes frequently in the night. I did some gentle sleep training at sox months which worked great for about 4 weeks but we hit another sleep regression/progression and It all went back to the way it was. I stopped trying to fix it and just kept my response consistent and hoped the consistency would improve things. But her sleep is just getting worse. It just feels like there is no end in sight. I can’t rest during the day on my days off as I have to hold her.

I don’t really know what the point of this post is rather then just to rant as I know there isn’t much I can do about it. The lack of sleep is all just getting a bit too much for me at the moment. When I got her back to sleep at 3.30 this morning I actually just sat in bed and cried as I knew she would be up again and like clock work 5.30 and awake.

Don’t get me wrong. She does have her good nights where she will just have 2 or 3 short wakes and straight back down, and we no longer co sleep so at least I have a bit of comfort for the sleep I actually get. But these good nights seam to be happening less and less.

I would love to have a second baby but her sleeping issues are really putting me off. There is no way I could cope and it’s all just so upsetting. And with being back at work the lack of sleep is just really stressful. Like I said I know there is no ‘fix’. I think I just need to get it out as I can’t keep complaining to friends and family who just say let her cry x

Hi @ExcitingTimes2021

Sorry you're going through this. It's so hard when you're sleep deprived. This was very similar to what I was going through with my little one - from about 4 months old to 10 months. It was getting worse and worse the older he was getting.
We reached the point when he used to wake even 10 times during the night, sometimes was also awake for 1-1.5h at 3 am, and woke for the day at 5:45. We used to co-sleep for nighttime and naps and EBF. He started to refuse cosleeping too. I was at a loss and sleep trained once he hit 10 months. It took a few days and I now have a baby who sleeps through from 7:30 pm to 6:00 am (now working on extending nighttime so it's 7:00 pm-6:30am). He also goes for naps on his own.
All I can say you need to do what feels right for you - if you don't want to sleep Train then maybe there's someone who you can tag team during the wake ups?

Hi @ExcitingTimes2021 I'm in the same position with my 10 mo and go back to work in 3 weeks so I'm panicking. Everything has gradually stopped working and we're getting less and less sleep plus regularly up for the day at 5am. @Dahlia5 what method did you use for sleep training? I used pick up put down for DC1 but they were much younger, tried it with DC2 but at 10 months it just winds him up more!

Honestly, I don’t think there’s a way to get through this without crying - either your DC crying for a couple of nights, or you crying for months to come.

We used the Ferber approach with my 3 DCs and it worked brilliantly. My 1-year-old sleeps 8pm-6:30am with 2 decent naps during the day (naps sorted themselves out once nights were fixed. I literally just turn off his light, turn on the white noise, song a lullaby, and put him in his crib. He rolls over and closes his eyes. Done.)

Every night we went to sleep train I prepared myself for an epic battle of wills. But it really wasn’t bad at all, and my kids truly don’t seem damaged in any way by it. They’re friendly, play well together, are doing well at school/nursery, and are very affectionate with DH and me. Whatever fears I had about “breaking” them definitely did not pan out!

You say there's no fix but you have only tried gentle sleep training at 6 months?

We've just done Ferber with my 8 month old and it's changed my life. First night she cried for 1hour 15minutes (with me going in to gently soothe her every 5 minutes or so and leave again). It was awful. Overnight she got up once for a quick feed and then back to sleep.
2nd night, 45 minutes crying and slept all night.
3rd night 5 minutes crying and slept all night
4th night no crying at all, slept all night.
This was a baby who had never slept longer than a few hours at a time and would take an hour and a half to get back to sleep overnight.

It's not easy the first night or two, in fact it is absolutely horrible, but it works.

Also her daytime naps have improved too! She's like a different baby

@Dahlia5 what sleep training did you do? We tried to do Ferber but i just couldn’t hack it. So we did where I stayed In the room and basically didn’t pick her up and stroked her head and gave her the comforter til she nodded off. It took About three weeks and worked great for about a month then it was like a switch went off and she went back to how she was.

@JustRestingMyEyesForAMinute We tried to do Ferber to start with but I just couldn’t manage it. I’m too soft I think. And now she is bigger her cries are so much louder and harder. We have tried lots of things like building sleep associations, staying in the room, wake windows. I really don’t think I could cope with her crying which surprised me as when we started sleep training at six months that was the technique we went for and i don’t know why I couldn’t do it.

I don’t know. I also have PND and PNA which I think really clouds my judgement sometimes. All the time actually. I’m just feeling a bit lost x

I agree with the sleep changing suggestions but you need to look at her schedule too, a 2 hour wake window during the night screams undertired to me. I used to have a similar issue (even after sleep training) when I was trying to put my baby down from 8-8 or 8-7 every night, I finally realised that my baby is a 10 hour night baby, now he goes to bed at 9 and up at 7 and very rarely wakes at night.

It appears a lot of this is your own doing…sleep training does work, especially with an older baby. I have a 9-month-old and we sleep trained her from an early age. When she is overtired, we do leave her to cry/grizzle but the majority of the time she does eventually go to sleep.

As a parent, you know the difference between im tired cry and im unwell cry/

We did a softer version of Ferber to start with where I did as you had, basically stroked her tummy and head and stayed close, and settled her more regularly than the Ferber method recommends. I couldn't leave her for more than a few minutes to cry (to start with). I gradually built that up to slightly longer.

The crying is awful. It's absolutely heartbreaking, but you do have to power through and stick with it. You know it has worked once, so it will work again. Honestly you'll both be much better slept for it.

Have you had some help for the PND? I started Sertaline after this one was born and it's helped massively x

@shivawn thanks. I loosely follow wake windows and after 3/4 hours she is ready for a nap/bed. If I try to push any later she is a screamy mess and if I tried for a third nap to push bedtime back a bit she wouldn’t go down til well past 10pm. She doesn’t sleep much during the day. Normally 1.5-2 hours over 2 naps. When she is at nursery she will go all day on only 20 mins but is so grumpy when we pick her up. I thought she could be overtired from her nursery days but they can’t force her to sleep! Same as I can’t. And I can’t afford to not work just to make sure she naps during the day. Feels like a rock and hard place.

@safetyfreak thanks for your reply. I’m sure you don’t mean it to come across this way but your comment just seamed quite unsupportive and judgy when I was just basically posting to get how I was feeling out. Yesterday was a very rough day. I have no doubt that it works for most babies, it worked for mine, until it didn’t. My head just isn’t in a great place at the moment so I’m struggling to think and see rationally.

@JustRestingMyEyesForAMinute thanks. I might have to try again. Yes I have gotten so much support. It just keeps rearing its ugly head just when I think I have things under control.

like I said I’m not expecting a magic solution to make it all go away. I was literally just posting to try get out of a funk I was feeling yesterday after an awful night. X

I don't really agree with the previous poster "a lot of this is your own doing" all babies are different and having one that was a terrible sleeper and one who was amazing I can tell you I did absolutely nothing different. So many people give you advice like "I fed them in the dark with whale music playing and they slept through by 3 weeks..."

We also tried Ferber with my eldest and couldn't hack it. Some babies are really determined and after 3 hours of constant screaming we decided it wasn't for us. We were feeding to sleep so night weaning was the magic bullet for us, but I appreciate that definitely isn't for all babies! Sending sympathy it is tough.

@ExcitingTimes2021 I hear you, it's so tough when you have a bad sleeper. I'd definitely try for a minimum of 4 hours awake time before bed if you can to try and build up that sleep pressure for the night. My baby is 8 months and we do 4.25 hours for his last window. If he starts getting tired and cranky before those 4.25 hours are up then I take him out to the back garden and we go around and look at all the flowers and that change of scenery will normally revive him.

@ExcitingTimes2021 @Hep1211
We did Ferber method. Don't get me wrong it was really hard on me mentally to do this and perservere, but it was definitely worth it. He never cried for more than 20 min on day 1, 2 and 3. Subsequent few days/nights it was 5-10 min. Now it's just a few whinges for maybe 30 seconds and then he falls asleep within a few minutes happily chatting to himself.
I never ever imagined he'd be able to do this. We tried a gentle gradual withdrawal method a couple of months before, but that never worked.