What are the alternatives to controlled crying?

[NoPainNoGain]

DD, almost 10 months, has been waking up in the night for the last 3 weeks. For the first week I settled her quickly with a bottle, then decided to give this up, not being strictly necessary. For the last 2 weeks she´s been awake, normally for around 2 hours at any time between around 1.30 and 5.30am. None of our efforts to help seem to help her and DP and I are completely exhausted. What can we try? She settles herself to sleep at all other times.

Eats wells, drinks well, falls asleep in evening and at nap times no problem... Have offered water in the night (to her absolute disgust).. and she isn´t interested in milk until she´s been up for a good while in the morning. So it´s not a hunger thing. But for some reason she´s been awake for hours in the night for around 3 weeks now... There´s no ignoring 2 hours worth of noises and ultimately crying...

have you tried pick up put down?
Maybe she just nees the reassuarance that you are there to get her back to sleep

yes, tried the pick up and down thing, co-sleeping, but it is just unwelcome. Really, unwelcome... DD is pretty unconsolable.

A couple of things you can try.

Having a plan is a very good start and an aim (or at least a goal that is reasonable)

It might be to get 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 hours straight through, whatever you think is an acceptable compromise for you and her.

Then the plan.

You can choose what you want, a couple of suggestions are this one..
here

or elizabeth pantley who suggests things like gradual withdrawal and ways to stop feeding to sleep.

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Basically, decide what the problem is.
Decide where you want to end up.
Come up with a plan.

thanks for that.. The ep link looks interesting!

Just to clarify, DD hasn´t taken a bottle in the night since she was 6 months old, so it´s not like I´m trying to get her to sleep through for the first time. And she´s not an early riser.. This morning she was awake at 5am (and this was such a good day, really!!) but she is more typically awake from 1.30 - 3.30 or 2 - 4 am..

It just seems incredible that the 6 months of waking to feed her in teh night were actually much easier than the last 3 weeks of being awake for hours and hours for no obvious reason. Why have things gone from bad to worse?

well, could be lots of reasons. has she or she about to start crawling? I found this disrupted sleep for my dd. I think that maybe when they are learning new things their minds get very busy.. even in the night.