Chloe is nearly 11 months now, and has always been a terrible sleeper, sometimes worse than others! It has recently dawned on me that some of the sleep troubles we're having might actually be food related, rather than just due to a complete lack of sleep training.
When Chloe was very little, from a few weeks to around 3-4 months we had a period of crying during feeds, refusal to feed, very slow weight gain. After a number of weeks we finally figured out that the problem was excessive foremilk causing excessive wind - lots of crying and farting, poor girl! I started pumping a little bit of milk off before feeds and our problems disappeared almost immediately.
We then had a period of things being ok with feeding and sleep. She's always woken several times at night, but I assumed that was due to us AP-ing her to sleep. She would have the odd night where she would wake not long after bedtime and I wouldn't be able to feed her back to sleep. She would start to feed but after a minute or so she would pull off crying and get really upset if I kept trying to feed her. I would end up getting her up, she would usually eventually do a poo then after a while I would be able to feed her back to sleep. This could take 2-3 hours.
Over the last couple of months these very unsettled nights where she's been up in the evening have become more and more frequent, to the point that they're now the norm rather than the exception. Very tiresome!! A few things have happened in the last few months: we've started solids, including cheese and yogurt; I went back to work, which changed our bf habits. I started pumping twice a day at work (at normal feed times) for the first few weeks, but was pumping so much milk that I dropped to pumping just once a day, usually late morning. I suspect this has meant that when I feed her at bedtime there's a lot of foremilk there again.
The last week or so I've been pumping before the bedtime feed, and we've seen quite an improvement in her sleep - waking lots, but back to sleep quickly. Last Th and Fri we gave her cow's milk on her cereal for breakfast. Thursday night she was very unsettled, Friday had diarrhea, and Friday night was awful, up for hours and really miserable. So since Saturday she and I have been completely off dairy and things seem to be improving.
Sorry for the very long post! Any thoughts? Thx