Advice for 7mo not sleeping through

[Ray24924]

Hello, I'm just after a bit of advice, my son is 7.5 months old and his sleeping is just horrific.

From 4-5.5 months he was sleeping 6,7, sometimes even 8 hours at night without waking and having 3 decent naps a day, then the 6 month regression came and hasn't ever left.

He is currently waking about every 2hours, but is inconsolable unless feeding (still breastfeeding) and it's 50/50 chance of him actually going back to sleep when he's in his cot, sometimes it can take up to 2hrs to settle him back down.

He's on 2 naps a day atm, they were 1.5hrs long but now he's waking up after 30 mins then I'm having to settle him back down again for another hour.

He is currently teething and he's learnt how to stand now so he is constantly trying to stand up in his cot which is stopping him from sleeping too.

We've had the same bed time routine since he was 1 month old:
Breastfeed, 30 mins later tea, 30 mins later bath, 30 mins later book and a final breast feed then bed

I'm at the point where I thought by now he'd be sleeping through and I'm getting constant judgement from family that he's not even though I've tried everything. I've done the put down pick up, he has white noise and a comforter (which I remove once asleep) and a dark room with perfect temperature. I don't wanna do the ferber method if I can help it.

Any advice or is this something to just wait out lol 😆 thanks x

This was me.
The solution for us, at 9m after the worst 2 months of my life and like you trying everything, was to put a double bed in his room next to the wall and take it in turns bedsharing with him. We started just because we were both so exhausted it felt frankly unsafe walking around or sitting in rocking chair. So in the bed he'd roll about, play, whilst whichever parent at least semi dozed next to him and he eventually went to sleep. Nothing we did in terms of day schedule or resettling attempts worked.
Gradually we realised that having us in the bed from the start of the night helped. It seemed like he wasn't waking so much to start with, I think because he knew parental presence would be there and he wasn't in a state of anxiety waiting to wake alone.
Coslept on and off from 9-12 months then he was fine in a cotbed alone, then 14-18m shared again on a double floor mattress, then again own bed. I learnt that sleep isn't linear; that is, it doesn't start crap then gradually improve with age. There are ups and downs the whole way through. Don't get tied up worrying about habits, whatever rubbish people say about making a rod for your back etc. Just do what gets the most sleep for the most people tonight.
It's completely normal for a 7m old not to be sleeping through. Far far more unusual to be sleeping through, from my experience and friends.
Join the FB group Beyond Sleep Training. It really normalises biologically normal infant sleep and the solutions. Which is often bedsharing, fyi!

As you're breastfeeding, you've got the perfect situation to bedshare. With my second, I was so desperate to breastfeed after my horrific sleep with first, who I couldn't breastfeed. Every night I wished I was able to feed back to sleep. Suffice to say from day 2 at home second was in my bed, and at 15m is still there. It's brilliant. I literally pull her to me when she stirs and we're both back to sleep within seconds. I won't be stopping either BF or bedsharing until she sleeps through. My first started sleeping through about 24 months.

Sleeping through the night at seven months. That makes me laugh. 😂

My eldest started sleeping through at 13 months.

At 7 months both mine would wake about every three hours.

What are your wake windows like? We went through the same, now I've increased his last wake window and it seems to have done the trick. Does he seem tired at bed time?

This was us! Huge solidarity.

It really didn’t improve until I weaned off BF at 10 months. Then she’d sleep until 2ish in her cot, wake once get in with us and then sleep through until 8.

Then it took us until 16 months and some sleep training (which was honestly awful for the first week) to get her sleeping in her cot in her own room 8pm-6am (most of the time).

I genuinely feel like we tried everything, I’m not sure if things would have been better had we done things differently, or what we should have done.

Theres so much conflicting advice out there - and families recollections of how their now grown babies slept or didn’t sleep can be fuzzy at best. So the only advice I can give is to give yourself grace.

What you're describing is exhausting but normal. My breastfed similar aged baby wakes roughly two hourly for feeds all night long. Sometimes wakes in between for comfort too. They're the worst of my three kids for sleep. One of the others was also breastfed at this age but only used to wake twice a night for feeds. But they had a dummy so that's why I reckon this one sleeps worse (refused dummy, we did try loads!).

Most babies wake in the night at 7 months. It’s a huge period of development and rapid growth. More than 60% are still waking through their second year. Kindly your expectations are wrong here, but there’s lots of media that perpetuates the idea they should be sleeping through by now when it’s really not typical. Your family are being ridiculous too, just ignore them and don’t talk about sleep with them if they’re going to be unhelpful