Suggestions for cosleeping mobile baby

[sntm]

We have had a major sleep setback. I seem to make bad sleepers.
Baby is almost 8 months. The last few weeks he has learned to pull himself up, cruise and crawl. Along with this, it has started taking forever to get him to sleep as he promptly rolls over. Sits up, Stands up and there goes sleep. We've tried the usual nurse to sleep in our bed, nursing to sleep in rocking chair and then going in crib (where he usually naps), and starting in crib. It's taking over an hour now. He is an escalter, so even if I was comfy with CIO, I see it being disastrous

Any suggestions?

[Liziz]

Well, we don't cosleep, but the rest sounds pretty similar to DD around 8 months. I won't claim it had been going well before then, but it started to get really bad right around then....1+ hour bedtimes sounds right on par! I don't have great advice, but I at least wanted to say you're not alone.

For us, it got better about a month later. We actually did end up doing a semi-accidental CIO that ended the reign of bedtime terror, but I don't think it's actually CIO that worked -- I think the time was just right.

The thing that worked best for us -- we'd hold DD tight and jiggle her (like we did when she was super young a la Happiest Baby) to sleep. We'd then put her in the crib, where she'd wake up. We'd quickly put our hand on her back (she sleeps on her belly -- her choice, not ours, but no use fighting it) and semi-hold her down while gently using the hand to jiggle her (so she's lying on her stomach, our hand on her back gently moving back and forth). Sometimes it doesn't work and she just fights and flips over/sits up ('cause I'm not actually gonna hold her down on the mattress), but often times the gentle pressure and jiggling are enough to keep her still -- then the continued jiggling (end up doing it for a few minutes often) is enough to get her to sleep.

Good luck, and hopefully you'll turn a corner soon....sleep stuff is the absolute worst!

[mctlaw]

Shannon, . We don't co sleep except out of desperation (though the crib is in our room) but mine is just a couple weeks behind yours and super mobile as well, and I've gotten very little sleep in his lifetime since he's never really slept longer than 3 hours and is often up on the hour. As of late he would wake every 20-45 minutes for about the first 6 hours or so of his sleep time. Since he turned 6 months I've tried various methods with different results (he just turned 7 m).

What I've been doing for the past 5 days seems to be working and I don't see why it would not work for co-sleeping. Basically I enforce bedtime and nurse him but not to the point of asleep (which is getting harder to do anyway), and kiss him goodnight, tell him time to sleep. Then I lay him in his crib and sit next to him. The first night he did cry a lot but it was a protest type cry, not the terrified type cry he gave when we tried Ferber. Also, he is not becoming afraid of his sleeping space as he did with Ferber.

After the first night he is now alternating crying with playing and so I'm hopeful soon crying will be minimal. I'm often in the bedroom with him for an hour or half but once he settles to sleep he has only been waking once or twice to nurse-instead of the multiple times described above.

I started doing this method after the pickup/put down method seemed too stimulating. I do pick him up if he gets really worked up though,or if he moves into a bad position while rolling/army crawling around crib. In searching here there are several posters who have had success with this technique, I think.

Could you try this while he is in your bed? If he gets too close to the edge of the bed simply move him back with minimal fanfare.

[sntm]

When I tried something like that, he started banging his head on the side of the crib. I ordered a crib bumper to see if that helps.

[sntm]

Oh, missed the last paragraph. I ended up doing that Friday night out of desperation. It was late putting him to bed (9ish) and he passed out at 10 after crawling around on the bed. But was up at 5:30 and had only two one hour naps yesterday - he just really needs to be asleep by 7:00ish