Hi all. I don't want to come here and complain but I need to vent.
I haven't had a good nights sleep in months. My 11 month old daughter is a horrible sleeper. It's very hard to get her to nap during the day unless we take her for a long ride in the car. At night, she has to be rocked to sleep and given a bottle. Then, maybe 3 or 4 hours later she wakes up crying. The again 1 to 2 hours later, and so on throughout the night. There have been weeks here and there that she would sleep through the night, but no matter what we do, we can not get her to sleep through now. When she wakes up, most of the time she's really not awake, but just whining really loud. She is in our room, and will be for an un-known amount of time. We live in a 2 bedroom house, and my oldest daughter has the other room. There's no way I can put the baby in there with the way she sleeps. Plus I don't want to take my older daughter's privacy away from her. It's really the only place she can when she needs to be alone. Lately when the baby wakes up, she cries until I give her a bottle of formula. I've tried to get her to take just water but she refuses it and then just cries more. And sometimes she'll wake at 3am and not go back to sleep...insisting on playing or crying the whole time. When I just can't take it anymore, I put her in bed with us, and most of the time she just tries to climb all over us instead of laying down to sleep.
I'm at my wits end right now and I'm so frustrated. I never had this problem with the older one. We've tried all the suggestions that the internet has short of the extreme sleep training. It's effecting my everyday mood, making me very irritable, and I'm down right tired. I'm to the point where I don't want to quilt right now...which is something that I love doing.
Thanks for letting me vent. I needed to just let it out and sometimes it's better to do it with online friends then real-life ones...