How do you go about laying down a little one "sleepy but awake"?

[element2012]

I may be a little late asking this question, but here goes... DD is 10.5 months and we are having some real sleep challenges.  It may be teething, developmental milestone, wonder week, who knows? But I do know that more often than not the last few weeks she has been up every 1-2 hours nightly.  Thank heavens my wonderful husband is able to pick her up, and she falls back asleep, and put her back in her floor bed at least one or two of the wakings.  After that, she is in the bed with us, usually sleeping with DH for the first cycle, then with me to nurse off and on.  I honestly don't really know where to begin with sleep training, but I know we must do *something* because I can't live like this!  Our current routine involves the usual bath, nurse to sleep and transfer to her bed.  She used to sleep at least 4 hours, and now it is usually about an hour.  My only experience of her going to sleep without nursing or being snuggled was just one time where she woke up to play in the middle of the night, and DH and basically stayed asleep while she played in between the two of us, and I later awoke to find her back asleep between us.  I feel we need to move in the direction of night weaning, and also move towards being able to lay her down sleepy but awake and for her to settle herself.  How do I go about doing this?

[voxana]

I don't think my kids would have tolerated night weaning at your daughter's age, but if you want to give it a try, I have a couple suggestions.  For getting the baby to go down awake, you could nurse her, but not to sleep, and then hand her off to her father so that he can try to gently work with her to fall asleep.  Baby's/toddlers often tolerate their dads changing the sleep patterns better than their mothers. Or you could try Dr. Jay Gordon's method, but he doesn't recommend night weaning till after baby reaches 12 months or in exceptions where the mother is really exhausted. http://drjaygordon.com/attachment/sleeppattern.html

[element2012]

Thanks for that tip, that's exactly what I'll do. Last night was torture. Even my DH who has the patience of Job was at his wits end last night. The girl just would. not. settle. down. We are just going to be very relaxed and quiet this evening and hope we don't have a repeat. I like the Dr Jay Gordon technique and have decided that once these top 4 teeth do finally come through (one is cutting through right now), we will night wean. She will likely be over 12 months by then. She is really putting us to work to get her to sleep at night and I'm really needing her to learn how to settle...