Hey all
We're really struggling with my 7 month old's sleep and I'd love if anyone has any ideas. She was very unwell until 4.5 months with undiagnosed CMPA and other allergies. She's EBF. We sleep trained at 4 months because she physically wouldn't let us hold/rock/carry her she was in so much pain so we were forced to get her to learn to fall asleep herself. Not ideal when she was unwell but literally nothing else worked.
Sleep training (modified Ferber method) worked really well for the first month then became a bit less effective as we became a bit more lenient with comforting her - essentially getting to a point we felt comfortable with rather than being painfully strict and allowing her to cry all the time when she didn't need to. But this had been totally fine up until about 2 weeks ago.
Now at 7 months she has very suddenly reverted back to a pre-sleep trained state. Can still connect sleep cycles and often has a 2 hour nap in the day but is just impossible to get down and is waking every 2-4 hours at night again. Goes absolutely through the roof screaming when left in sleep training style, has never really liked being rocked due to past pain I think so that makes her worse. Occasionally she will fall asleep feeding or laying beside me but that's normally after 1 hour + of her getting frustrated, hitting, scratching at me because I'm largely ignoring her and trying to be a calming presence.
We're using same bed routine as always. We have tried shorter and longer wake periods, earlier and later bed times.. nothing seems to work and she ALWAYS wakes about 45 mins after going down and we have the battle all over again. It's breaking my heart having her so upset every time we get to bed time and honestly it's obliterating my mental health having to deal with so much crying. She is a very, very loud crier and 10x worse than when we initially sleep trained. Just totally at wits end!
Notes: She is no longer unwell! She was also fine being put down and left when she was teething and didn't get upset, just woke more often.