DS is 8 months and since he was 3 months he slept for 6 hours straight maybe only about 3 times. The rest of the time it's been an ongoing ordeal, him waking up every 2 hours on average. Below are his night time sleep patterns for the last 5 months.
A good night (very rare):
DS would wake up every 3 hours and go to sleep easily after a short nursing session. Then he would wake up for the day around 5-6:30am. Sometimes I would be able to "convince" him to sleep longer if he would wake up at 4-5 am and think the day should start. I would put him into our bed and lay down nursing him till he nods off to sleep again for another hour giving us extra time to sleep.
An average night:
DS wakes up every 2 hours to nurse and goes to bed within 10-15 min after waking while nursing. Sometimes I have to get up and rock him to sleep to put him into his crib asleep, otherwise, he may decide to hang out for 2 hours. He would wake up for the day before 5am and I have to take him into our bed for laying down nursing to make him fall asleep till 6:30 am.
A bad night:
DS wakes up every hour or more frequently, fussy. It's hard to put him to sleep. At least once a night with one of his wakings he would be up for 2 hours and wouldn't go to sleep for nothing in the world. He would then be up for the day at 6-6:30am. Or, he would think 4am is time to get up and there is nothing that would make him go back to sleep.
The problem is that the bad night scenario is waaaay more frequent than most of the books on baby milestones suggest. He can't be having this 5 months long milestone and he isn't even close to teething. I was a late teether at 10 months, he prob will be the same. He only had one cold so far, he doesn't have reflux with projectile vomiting or excessive spit up. He is gassy and solids haven't been easy for him, but this has only been 1.5 months and his sleep has been poor way before it. We get a bad night pretty much at least every week or sometimes 2-3 times a week or if it's a "good" stretch 1 every two weeks (very rare). This has been going on continuously for 5 long miserable months.
We are pretty much at the end of our rope and I don't know what to do. I am losing hope that he will EVER sleep through the night or at least have more "good" nights than "bad" until he is 2 years old. I won't survive this without falling into the deep depression (I am getting close to it) and/or requiring medication, and/or resenting my poor child and the entire motherhood. Already, my brain has turned to mush... I am not productive at work, I am barely hanging onto my job at this point... anything challenging going my way, I wouldn't handle it. I have stress induced insomnia at the start of the night fearing another "bad" night. Reading sleep books and feeding books and other baby books is just making me angry at this point, DS is obviously not "average", which is what these books tend to be geared towards. Sleep books tend to suggest all babies have the same sleep needs, which I am starting to doubt at this point.
To make matters worse, I have a mother who is dead against any CIO sleep training sending me articles and calling me all the time about how harmful CIO is and that is my duty to calm him down when crying and that he has a reason. She thinks he is constantly hungry and that is why he wakes up all the time.
Last night out of sheer desperation I fed him a bottle of EBM with 3 tbsp of oatmeal mixed in.... Never though I would resort to this method so frequently condemned by all the progressive parenting advice, but I just desperately wanted to "thicken" the BM to make it more like formula, so that it stays longer in his digestive tract. He pooped and woke up for 2 hours again, so, that didn't work.
So, when is this going to get better? Have any of you had LO's with the nightmare sleep and feeding habits and at which point has it gotten better. I just want to believe at this point....
This is not what motherhood is supposed to be about - waiting and longing for you awesome baby to get older.
Thank you for reading this long post.