I'm hoping for some advice about how to get my 9 month old to sleep a little more.
For context, she is my second child and her brother is two and a half. When he was a baby we tried to put him in his own room at 6 months and it was an epic fail. He ended up sharing our room and usually our bed for all or part of the night until he was well over a year old and I was pregnant again so we had an urgent need to get him out of our bedroom. We tried sleep training a couple of times, it didn't work and we ended up abandoning it pretty quickly because we didn't like leaving him to cry. Now he sleeps independently in his own room but I can't for the life of me remember how we did it.
With his sister, there are various complicating factors. Firstly, she's a bottle refuser and now I'm back at work and she is at nursery all day she wants to breastfeed a lot in the evenings and through the night and I'm reluctant to cut down just yet because that's probably still her main source of calories. Her brother would take expressed breastmilk at the childminder's, but she clamps her mouth shut at the sight of a bottle. Secondly, she's developed the terrible habit of not being able to fall asleep without a boob in her mouth. And thirdly, we can't really let her cry even for a short time because if we do she will wake her brother up. We didn't have that consideration last time.
Any advice about how to approach this? I'd like to aim to get her sleeping in her own bed in our room - we are currently co-sleeping - as a first step. I also want to find a way of getting her to fall asleep without being fed to sleep. Then in a couple of months I'd like to start cutting down on night feeds. The aim is that once she's no longer feeding at night we will put her cot in her brother's room and they will share for a few years.
Any tips would be very much appreciated because I am knackered!
Thank you.