Our almost 8 month old has awful sleep patterns. He's always been a frequent night waker, and I can handle that most of the time as he usually nurses and drifts off to sleep again (without my having to get out of bed.) In this case, frequent means well in excess of 20x/night.
Over the past couple weeks however, it's totally hit or miss as to getting him down at night when I go to bed (we cosleep, and he goes to bed when I do) much of the time, he becomes frantic and starts flailing/screaming when it's time to go to bed. If he does go to sleep, he waked within an hour or so and is up all night long. My husband and I are having to sleep in shifts to try to survive (I got to sleep from 3 am to 5am last night.)
Some of it is teething, but he has always been a very poor sleeper. He does take naps during the day, but only if he's swaddled and we get lucky. He generally runs on about 4 hours sleep in a 24 hour period. I think some of his frantic behavior stems from being chronically overtired, but we can't seem to break the cycle.
This is our third child, and the first one I've had where I really have come to resent how tired I am, and I don't like feeling that way. I can tolerate normal sleep interruptions, but this is above and beyond normal.
Night-weaning and CIO are not options for our family at this point in time. If it would make a huge difference in his sleep pattern, I might consider moving him to his own sleeping space in our room, but that's a last-resort as he nurses so much, I suspect I would get even less sleep than I do now.
Over the past couple weeks however, it's totally hit or miss as to getting him down at night when I go to bed (we cosleep, and he goes to bed when I do) much of the time, he becomes frantic and starts flailing/screaming when it's time to go to bed. If he does go to sleep, he waked within an hour or so and is up all night long. My husband and I are having to sleep in shifts to try to survive (I got to sleep from 3 am to 5am last night.)
Some of it is teething, but he has always been a very poor sleeper. He does take naps during the day, but only if he's swaddled and we get lucky. He generally runs on about 4 hours sleep in a 24 hour period. I think some of his frantic behavior stems from being chronically overtired, but we can't seem to break the cycle.
This is our third child, and the first one I've had where I really have come to resent how tired I am, and I don't like feeling that way. I can tolerate normal sleep interruptions, but this is above and beyond normal.
Night-weaning and CIO are not options for our family at this point in time. If it would make a huge difference in his sleep pattern, I might consider moving him to his own sleeping space in our room, but that's a last-resort as he nurses so much, I suspect I would get even less sleep than I do now.
8 months was the worst sleeping time for us. DS would wake every 15-30 minutes all night. It was awful. Then around 9.5/10 months he went back to his normal hourly waking.
