9 month old good sleeper but inconsolable if woken

[Armo24]

Hello, I wondered if anyone has experienced similar. I have a nearly 9 month old who is a great sleeper, gets herself to sleep for night time and naps after a story and sucks her thumb so resettles herself the majority of the time - I feel very lucky and grateful. The one thing is that if she is woken up or wakes up and can’t get back to sleep she goes absolutely hysterical - screaming crying with no let-up like I haven’t heard since the newborn days, you know the type of crying that is so intense it seems like she’s hyperventilating. The saddest thing is that I cannot soothe or settle her - not even by breastfeeding. I’ve tried rocking her and singing the lullaby that used to help settle her, stroking, shushing, patting, etc. In fact we are starting to realise that it actually gets even worse if we intervene. This happens both in day naps if she wakes up too soon and at night if she wakes up. I don’t know what to do and I feel really helpless that I somehow now can’t settle my own baby! It used to be that she’d immediately go calm in my arms or on the boob. Any advice or similar experiences?

Just accept it. DD was always inconsolable when she woke up from her afternoon nap. No reason. I just cuddled her until she calmed down. She is now a teenager who goes to sleep when she is tired!

My eldest was like this. If we tried to wake him from a nap before he was ready we'd just get hysterical screaming, sometimes for more than an hour no matter how much we tried to comfort or distract him. Made it not worth trying to wake him tbh. And he would only nap in his cot, stopped sleeping in the pram completely by 4 months. Eventually we just accepted that he was going to nap for 3+ hours (sometimes 4 hours) every afternoon and all the disruptions to any plans we had that came alongside. Thankfully we dropped the nap by 3 and got our afternoons back. You will come out the other side, however difficult things seem right now.

Thanks! At the moment the more I try and cuddle the more furious she gets - I’m sure it’s a phase but feels quite stressful when none of my usual soothing techniques work, especially in public :(

Thank you so much - it’s reassuring to hear other people’s experiences! Yes I’ve tried comforting and distracting her when she’s in that zone but nothing will help, it just seems to make it worse. And yes I am trying to cling to pram naps but she does seem to prefer the cot. All I can think of is that she has become almost too much of an independent sleeper and there’s not much we can do to help her anymore - and we must not interrupt!