All right ladies. It's hit, the dreaded 10 month sleep regression. We had just gotten naps sorted (taking two 1.5-2 hour naps a day at the same time every day) and sleeping 12-13 hours at with 2 wake ups, when suddenly BAM! Sleep regression (or maybe a phase, but dang is this killer). So for 2 nights LOs sleep habits suddenly changed for the better. He went down with no fuss at 6:15 as usual, and just slept. He didn't budge until between 2-3, when he woke for a feed for 15 minutes (a freakin dream right?!) and was back down until 7-7:30. I thought my dreams were coming true and I was finally going to be able to sleep like a relatively normal person again. NOPE! After those 2 nights LO is fighting naps with a vengeance (15-20 minutes of talking/whining himself to sleep, for maybe 45 minutes-1 hour of nap) and waking like clockwork (seriously, you can set your watch by it) 45 minutes to an hour after I put him down for bed. He wakes up screaming. Now sometimes I can rock him for 5 minutes and he's back out like a light, no problem, but for the most part he just continues to cry and scream as soon as I put him back down in his crib even though he may have been dead asleep a minute before. I don't want to create a sleep crutch by nursing him at this time (I know the kid has a very full belly after having had dinner and nursed before bed) and CIO and controlled crying just seem to ramp it up more (I did controlled crying about a month ago to fix some bad habits and it worked with minimal fuss, and this is way more than minimal fuss). Any advice? Mama wants her sleep back (especially since hubby is deployed and I literally need to sleep because there is nobody to let me take a nap to stay functional through this, because nap time is when dishes/laundry/everything else gets done)!
As a side note, we changed the order of bedtime a bit this week, do I need to switch back? We used to do dinner, bath, bed, but I inserted a little more wear out time after dinner as it was a struggle to get him to go down without a little extra wiggle time. Maybe I need to do the wear out time in his room where it's dark and quiet while I read a story (this child has no interest in sitting on my lap for a story except to tear pages out of the book, so generally I let him crawl around the room while I lie on the floor and read).
Re: 10 month sleep regression
We had 4 wake-ups last night. I'm not sure if it was just a really bad night or if the 10 months regression has started.