6 month old baby sleep - regression or affected by a cold?

[TashieWoo]

DD is 6 months and one week now. During the 4 month regression we enlisted the help of a sleep consultant and did some gentle sleep training - staying with her and comforting her while she settled herself to sleep. This was hard at first with quite a bit of crying, but she wasn’t left to cry alone and we patted her and shhh’ed / sang her to sleep. It worked really well and she was reliably going to sleep after her bedtime routine - I would do bath, massage then BF until she was v drowsy then DP would take her into our room (she’s still in with us).

Then on Tuesday this week she became unwell with a cold, not seriously unwell and she’s a lot better now, but she will no longer go drowsy when BF before bed and she won’t settle for DP, only me since Wednesday and he has always done bedtime. On Wednesday she was struggling with falling asleep then realising she couldn’t breath very well so we used the nasal aspirator which helped, and yesterday I bought a saline spray and use that with the aspirator before bed. Tonight she cried as soon as DP put her in the crib and settled for me eventually, I did get her up and use the aspirator again as she was a bit snuffly. We are using a calpol vapour plug in too.

DD is my first baby and this is her first poorly episode so I’m a bit clueless. Is it normal for baby sleep to be affected like this and how can I get it back on track? Or could this be the 6 month sleep regression (whatever it is) and separation anxiety?

Before illness she was waking for a feed twice a night and they were quite quick wake ups, the last few nights she’s only woken up once.

thanks in advance, Tash xx

The progress to better quality sleep is not linear, you will get these ups and downs for the the first few years

What FATE said.

Unfortunately we had a similar experience, sleep training worked very well…. until an illness or teething or a regression came along. Never got as bad as it had been (awake every 40 minutes…) but definitely up and down.

While she is ill do whatever you need to do to get her to sleep, she needs sleep to get better and you can’t sleep train a poorly baby. Then worry about fixing it later, if it’s still an issue when she is well. —though by then something else will have come along—

Thank you both - I know you’re right and there isn’t always an answer, I think that because DD is doing so well I’m conscious of messing things up and just want to do the right thing.

I think I need to work on my resilience a bit more, and try to catastrophise less, as that isn’t going to help anyone. I don’t need loads of sleep myself but I am going back to work soon and the idea of severe sleep deprivation and stress affecting my DD and my health scares me a bit.

@TashieWoo We’re going through this now but not sure whether it’s the fact that he has a cold/is congested or the dreaded 4 month sleep regression as DS is 13 weeks old. We’re using saline spray, nose frida, calpol plug in and olbas oil. How sleep recover for u or did you have to use techniques to help your little one to sleep? We’ve gone from 2-3 wake ups a night to only a 2 hour stretch from the start of the night to crying every hour. He’s BF and won’t take a bottle x

Hi @poppet131 , sleep did recover fairly quickly (I think, it was a while ago and DD is 9 months old now!) but as was advised on here I went back to feeding to sleep. Since then DD has started nursery and been through separation anxiety, sleep is very up and down but I will say that when I’ve fed her to sleep for a period of time, like 3 weeks plus, she hasn’t forgotten to go to sleep independently and she’s started doing that again now.

I’d say that your baby is more likely going through the 4 month regression as my DD was like that then. How does he get to sleep initially? I did a post once on the techniques my sleep consultant gave for teaching independent sleep, I don’t know if you search my name it’ll come up?