Hi,
I'd welcome some help. I have a very spirited 6 month old son who was quite poorly when he was born and for the first 3 months or so was in some physical pain. My health visitor advised not trying a routine until he was better so I spent my time trying to keep him as comfortable as possible.
He has always been a good night sleeper, doing 5 hours from around 7or8pm since he was born, and sleeping 8 till 6am from about 10 weeks. However, he has never been a good day sleeper. When he was small this did not seem to matter as he did not show any signs of tiredness during the day. However, since he became more mobile he has been getting tired in the day.
At about 3 months he started falling asleep when we were doing things at around 10, 1 and 4 so I decided to use ssh/pat then pu-pd to teach him to sleep at these times. Initially this did work, but it could take anything from 10 minutes to an hour for him to sleep, and was not a constantly reducing time. However, he would never sleep longer than 30 minutes, despite me continuing pu/pd until the 1.5 hours was up.
About a month ago he got a severe cold, then his first two teeth and another cold, and now sleeping is even worse. He shows all the physical tiredness signs most of the time (yawning, whinging, eye rubbing etc), but he sometimes now completely resists going to sleep for the full 1.5 hours, even if he does go to sleep its never for longer than 30 minutes and often considerably less then no return to sleep. I am now only pu-pd and then leaving a hand on his chest with sometimes some quiet words when he’s really worked up. I believe its because he's over-tired, but his night-time sleep is also suffering, about a month ago he started waking but going back to sleep relatively easily, now he can wake several times a night and be in and out of sleep for over an hour each time. In this last 4 weeks he has also started completely resisting my husbands’attempts to calm him at night or naps, and gets completely hysterical - we have been working really well as a team and are definitely consistent in what we are doing so we don't know why, but now it all seems to come down to me. We are sooooooo tired!
Strangely, his best time of the day is the hour before the bath, when he will play and then watch me prepare dinner!
My health visitor now wants me to do controlled crying, but we are dead against it, so we need some help to help our baby sleep before we all go insane
