Advice / encouragement :)

[Carolyn_mtl]

So here's the situation. DD is 7 months, and has always been a very easy happy baby. As a newborn she rarely cried (in 7 months, she may have cried 10 hours all together, seriously). She has also been a pretty good sleeper. By 3 weeks she would often go 3 or 4 hour chunks. Then at 11 weeks she discovered sucking her thumb, and would go 7 or 8 hour chunks. Then the teeth came in, both front bottom, within 2 or 3 days at 26 weeks. No more thumb sucking, I'm guessing she bit it once too many times, and now she no longer sleeps more than 1 to 2 hours (2 if Im really lucky, sometimes it's more like 30 mins).
We've co-slept and nursed to sleep her whole life. But when she sucked her thumb, once she was asleep, I could detach, lift her into her co-sleeper and she would find her thumb, and comfort herself throughout the night...
Now she rarely sleeps in her co-sleeper, she pretty much stays attached to me all night long, and no one is really getting any sleep.
Naps in the day are a disaster. Either I hold her and nurse her the whole time / lie in bed with her (then she naps 2-4 hours!) or I nurse her to sleep and attempt to put her in the co-sleeper (she usually wakes up with the movement / detachment, and cries / looks at me with the "mommy why are you abandoning me" face). So I obviously get nothing done all day, that and, I'm not sure how much longer my body can be sucked on 16 hours a day.
I don't even know what my question is. Someone tell me this is normal.. lol.

[Louisep]

Hugs. It sounds like a normal sleep regression to me. My ds did the same at 5 months. The rest of his first year was very rocky sleep wise and we tried a lot of different things to make it better. In the end I just had to ride it out.

I used the fact that ds needed me for naps as a chance to nap and rest too. I also caught up on sleep at weekends. Ds is not a great sleeper and we're in rough terrain again because of teething.

I can tell you time passes fast, you learn to manage the sleep deprivation (if you take naps etc), and they eventually start sleeping better again (for us 12-14.5 months). You really have to let go of household chores to get the rest you need.

Finally, if you want to try something to encourage longer stretches, check out the no cry sleep solution. Will she take a paci? I was very anti but it probably saved me from being a human paci (nothing wrong with that if you can sleep through nursing but I couldn't). The paci did not decrease the amount of wakings though.

Really common age for disrupted sleep. I've been on this board awhile now and dozens of mamas post the same thing.