My best friend, who has two kids and is great at this, keeps telling me: IT’S ALWAYS A PHASE. It will end.
Also, like Atrael said, screw teaching him to fall asleep on his own. He’ll learn in his own time. He’s still tiny; what he needs now isn’t the same as what he’ll need in three months, or three weeks. Just because he needs contact to fall asleep now, that doesn’t mean he will in a week or two. If the attempt to get him to sleep on his own is causing serious stress all round, then it probably isn’t the right time yet.
Yeah. I just about went out of my head when Gnat was this age. Before I had the second one I learned about development and sleep regressions. Four-five months is when a lot of babies just go nuts about sleep. Not anything you’re doing wrong.
I’m co-sleeping a lot longer with the second one because I need to be functional, and right now everyone seems to sleep better if I sleep with baby for at least part of the night.
I read the beginning of this thread, don’t want to read the middle, but I’ll let you know what we think.
Our boy is 13 mos., and when he was 5 mos. he was sleeping through the night; we thought we had it made. For the last 5-6 months we have been getting up once or twice on many nights. On good nights, not at all, but on bad ones every hour.
We looked into BabyWise and Ferberization, but it didn’t seem to feel good for us.
We just gave our baby what he needed…we let him know he was loved and we were there for him.
It is just a phase…a month ago, he started sleeping from 7-7 regularly, maybe with a 5-10 minute fuss once or twice a night. It feels awesome!
So don’t give up. I tell people (my brother and sister-in-law, for one) who are expecting that if I would have known how wonderful a 1 year old could be, it would have made 2-6 months much easier.