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Hi all –

My 8.5 month old is not a terrible sleeper, but so, so inconsistent that I have no idea how to help him. He can sleep through, or he can wake up 3 times, or anywhere in between. His wakeups can last 15 minutes, or they can last two hours. They can occur at any hour of the night, with no rhyme or reason. All this despite efforts of Biblical proportions to maintain a regular routine during the day with naps, nursing and meals happening around the same time. Because of this, I really don't even know where to begin.

He's usually up at 7 or so; nursing, breakfast, then a nap around 9. For months, his naps were no longer than 30 minutes; a couple of weeks ago, they started to lengthen and he was getting easily 60 minutes at a time, and sometimes as much as two hours. But then, they abruptly went back to 20 minutes. He'll have another nap around 1 (depending on how long the first one was), and maybe another one around 4 if I can get him to sleep (not too often). Bedtime is 8, after dinner, a bath if needed, stories and nursing. He often wakes 30 minutes after falling asleep (regardless of what his bedtime was – we've experimented with earlier and later), cries for 5-10 minutes, then settles down and goes back to sleep on his own. This is somewhat upsetting for us: we're on eggshells after putting him to bed, just knowing he'll wake and cry, and there's really nothing we can do to make that not happen. Once that's all over, we go to bed because we're exhausted!

I usually nurse him to sleep, and I'm of two minds about that. I like being able to nurse him, I find it convenient and I believe in the benefits for both of us. But. I don't know how to get him to sleep any other way, and now with all these night wakings I'm truly worried that I'm doing him more harm than good. But unless I get in there as soon as I hear him, he's guaranteed to be up for several hours and I just don't have it in me to deal with that night after night. So I nurse him back to sleep when he wakes.

I suspect that he's not really taking in enough food during the day, and it's making him hungrier at night: after a great start with solids, he now only wants to eat what we're eating and that makes it difficult to get enough into him. And daytime nursing sessions are invariably distracted and short. I'm tempted to switch to bottle feeding just so I can be more sure that he's getting enough, but that seems like such a silly reason to wean when my supply is good and he still wants to nurse.

So, as you can tell, I'm kind of a mess. This week has been rougher than usual because of teething and a cold, and my husband has a nasty cold too, so I'm just trying to get everyone as much rest as possible. I don't know what else to do, I feel like I don't see any good solution and I'm starting to really despair that I'll ever be able to help my little boy.

This has unexpectedly turned into a novel, and I'm sorry it's so disjointed and rambly. If anyone has a hint on how or where to begin I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks Kimberly,

The thing is, for a while he was pretty good at putting himself back to sleep: he would wake in the night, we'd hear some whimpering and then….nothing, he was back asleep. Then a few times, he'd start crying harder and harder until nothing could calm him down once we did go in (and this was in the middle of the night, so it would inevitably lead to being awake from 2-4am or something like that). And now we never know which way it will go!

You're right that I want to (and should) break the nursing-to-sleep association, but I don't think that's all there is to it. I think that's just one aspect of what we're dealing with: he has short naps regardless of who puts him to bed or how it happens. Since I'm going to be addressing his sleep in general, that's definitely something I'd like to tackle while I'm at it, of course. I'll look through the article you posted and will give it a shot.

Since I posted my original note last week, his night sleep does seem to have settled down a little – we're back to just one real wakeup a night, though the timing of that wakeup is completely erratic (bedtime, wakeup time and the rest of the daily routine are still consistent). So maybe there was a developmental leap happening that made things worse than usual. Still, it's not great as a general state of affairs, what with the short napping and the general inability to create any kind of consistency for him.