Our 5 month old DD has, up to very recently been a superb sleeper - always going down at 7pm with the minimum of fuss since about, oooh, 4 weeks old or so. She's a slow weight-gainer due to reflux (on Gaviscon since 6 weeks) - so we always had to wake her through the night for extra feeds, but since 4 months we've dropped them except for an 11pm dream-feed - and she goes through to 6am-7am fine.
However, in the last couple of weeks, and especially the last week, she's been getting increasingly fussy in the evenings - and takes about 3 hours to settle to bed. Normal pattern is a good feed at 7pm and we put her in her cot awake (always have done) - and she sleeps for 10mins before waking and crying with increasing voracity. We've tried leaving her to see if she'll settle, but the last time we tried it she went an hour and was pretty hysterical by the time we picked her up. So we'll give her a cuddle and another feed (she'll normally fall asleep out of tiredness at this point) - put her down again, and as soon as she's in the cot - crying again. This goes on for about 3 hours till she finally sleeps at 10.30pm ish. Evening gone. Frazzled parents.
We've made sure we've upped the amount of milk she's getting (she's ex-bf) to over 8 feeds (sometimes 9) in 24 hours, and she naps relatively ok during the day (she cries down for about 5-10 mins, and is then fine). She doesn't normally have a dummy, but we tried one out of desperation the other day and she just spit it out.
AFAIK we haven't changed her bed routine - she gets a walk with me (I'm the DH!), dressed for bed, a feed with DW (in darkened room) and then in to the cot. But it just doesn't seem to be working - and frankly, it's got us at breaking point - and copping a whole lot of unhelpful advice from both of DD's grandmothers about giving her formula or starting solids early, neither of which we are really prepared to do.
We've been telling ourselves this is just a phase, but it's been going on for a couple of weeks now and if anything seems to be getting worse.
Any ideas? Anyone had something similar?