Help, please! DD is 6 months old (today!). For the past few months, she sleeps in her crib. However, whenever she had a difficult time going back to sleep in the middle of the night, we would often put her in her swing and let her sleep the rest of the night there. Well, over the past few weeks, somehow that turned into "she sleeps in the swing every night".
We really don't want her sleeping in the swing, so we started to try to get her back in her crib. She goes down okay -- we'll rock her till she's almost asleep then put her in her crib, usually w/ a paci. She sleeps from 30 minutes to 2 hours....then she's back up and crying. What we've been trying is to go in and soothe her, but not pick her up from her crib. What that's resulted in is HOURS of DD crying with either DH or me patting and shushing and trying to soothe her.
The only thing that works to get her calmed down is to nurse. She'll drift off as she nurses, then wake up as she gets put in her crib, and lay there w/ open eyes for a few minutes. As long as she can see me or DH, she's fine. She'll fall asleep after 5-10 minutes. But then, she just wakes up again 30 minutes later and the whole cycle starts again. But, I'm only nursing her at night when it's been a long time since she last ate (aka might actually be hungry), so she's spending literally HOURS in her crib crying, with DH or me there trying to soothe her (which obviously isn't working).
We've been doing this for 3 days now, and haven't seen any improvement. I know that what we SHOULD have done was go back a couple months, read all the sleep books, and follow a consistent plan from the start. I just reserved a bunch of sleep books from the library today, but it's going to be another week or two before we can get them and read them, and I don't know how to survive until then. Please -- any tips or thoughts on what we should be doing right now?
To make matters worse, we go on a trip to the ILs over labor day. So part of me doesn't even want to bother to try until after that trip, and part of me feels like we need to solve this now, because they don't have a swing, so that wouldn't even be an option. And of course, this just makes DH and I both sleep deprived and crabby, and we've started to fight about this, even though we both know we need to work together and that we shouldn't. Help please!!