Night wakings and standing up

Hi,

I am almost 2 weeks into getting my almost 9 month old DS to sleep through in his own cot after months of co-sleeping. The co-sleeping worked great for a while but he ended up feeding to sleep pretty much constantly through the night and neither he nor I (or DH for that matter) were getting good sleep.

I am sort of following the Sleepsense program, more through what feels right than through wanting to follow a particular 'expert' book. Progress feels very patchy though and we are experiencing generally 3 night wakings, one of which will result in it taking around 2 hours to get him resettled. Getting to sleep in the first place can be very hit and miss, and just lately it seems that the second his pjs are on after his bath he gets hyper and very 'wired'.

I mostly stay with him as after so long being in with me I think leaving the room is a bit much for him at this stage, but sometimes I have to as he will lay there babbling and waving indefinitely, quite happy with me sitting there but not winding down to sleep at all. He promptly loses the plot when I do leave though and I don't leave him for any length of time. Plunket suggested I continue to feed if I found he needed it, but I think it was confusing for him to be fed at some wakings and not others, so last night I didn't feed at all and he didn't seem to want it (despite the 90 minute resettle from 3am). He doesn't have a particular toy to help him sooth, whenever we've tried one he just thrashes it about and seems to get more wound up. He does have a blanket which we've recently introduced and he is just starting to hang on to that for a bit of comfort.

The main obstacle seems to be his determination to stand up. I will lay him down multiple times and as soon as I do he is up again and it can go on for the whole time it takes to resettle (as I said, up to 2 hours). If I let him stand for a while it achieves nothing - he will stand there for ages, either chatting or crying. I guess it's taken a bit of a novel (sorry about that!) to ask what on earth I can do about the constant wanting to stand? He's hardly going to learn to self settle to sleep if he's forever standing up and he isn't yet at the stage of being able to get back to laying down on his own, especially as he is in a gogo bag.

Any ideas would be very appreciated! I know it is still early days and he is having to adjust but right now it feels as though we are not really moving forward.

Hugs GG, I had the same probelm with Bella with the standing up and she didthe same thing, would chat to me or cry and cry and cry, then fall over hurt herself, cry more!
So we did what MrsH23 did, and put her back in the Safe T Sleep and her sleeping has been heaps better, but she still takes about...up to an hour to settle to sleep most nights, I just use the controlled crying, I leave her for a few mins if she is still crying afrer 2 or 3 mins I go back in and try settle her, if she is still crying after a while I get her out of bed and cuddle her and burp her etc, then try settle her again.

She also does this in the middle of the night So Ive been getting the broken sleeps too, its so tiring having a baby who doesnt sleep well, or takes ages to get to sleep isnt it

Jake has been doing this since christmas... he has started to (finally) to lay back down when he gets too tired but I think the falling asleep standing and cracking his head on the cot is why he started to sit or lay down.

We often find him asleep on his knees with his head on the bed at the bottom of the cot now.

Controlled crying seems to be working for night sleeps but day sleeps are still on the sofa at the moment....

So its taken 5 months to get him to self settle from standing BUT I do have a very stubborn boy and we did go to Australia for a month in April which I think very much prolonged the situation.

J is in a sleeping bag too but he's completely figured how to stand up in it

I've spoken to Plunket today.....the nurse has suggested I stay in the room as per an earlier discussion we had on his sleep, because as I said he has been in with me until recently (we went from bringing him in with us for the latter part of the night to him being in with me for the entire night due to a recent month long trip to the UK), so leaving him to get in a state probably isn't the best thing for us at the moment. Tonight I am going to move the night light so that it's near my rocking chair, take a book and just stay in the room but pretty much ignore him. I'll lay him down a few times but then just let him get on with it unless he really needs help. Fingers crossed, it has been months since I had a night's sleep and I really don't want to find myself saying years a bit further down the track

We went through this but my DD was a little older than your boy. She was about 10.5 months. It was pretty infuriating but yes it is a phase that passes. We used the slowly removing ourselves from the room technique as she used to get way too worked up if we left after turning out the light. Do whatever works for you, from memory the phase lasted about 3 weeks in our house.