Losing my mind with sleep
Hello parents. First time dad to a 4 month old and hit a breaking point last night. In desperate need of some advice and as I’m sure other people have talked about this on here, I wanted to share our specific scenario and just see if what our plan moving forward is makes sense.
Our little guy has been a tough sleeper since the beginning. For the first 2 months he had bad reflux so we could never put him down to sleep. If we did, he would stay asleep for 30 minutes and wiggle himself awake after that 30 minute sleepy cycle was over. Which led to us having to carry him and rock him back to sleep in our arms. Lots of contact napping and contact sleeping at night with failure to keep him in his crib for more than 30 minutes.
This has continued and he’s 4 months and 1 week today. Both my wife and I are back to work and you can imagine how hard it’s been managing it. For naps we follow the wake windows and he goes down pretty quickly/easily and we try to put him down while “drowsy” and when he does go to sleep we get 30-40 minutes and then he’s up. He won’t stay asleep longer. This totals to about 3 hours of nap time total during the day.
At night, this continues but he knows it’s night time so he just keeps sleeping but needs to be picked up and held after the 30 minutes. We tried the gentle sleep training methods and nothing is working.
My wife and I are doing shifts so we each get atleast a few hour stretch of sleep but forget our sleep, I’m worried about him only sleeping for 30-40 min before waking up. I don’t want it to impact him negatively in the long run. We are entertaining the idea of the cry it out method because we’re losing our minds with barely any sleep and afraid this will go on if we don’t get him on a better schedule soon.
Every story we hear it’s that the kids atleast slept for 2-3 hours and stayed down when put in the crib. Man if we get 1-2hours at night I’ll rejoice. Please help or let us know we’re not the only ones. Have an appointment with the doc next week but i envision her telling us it’s normal 😅.
Things we’ve tried with no success:
1- swaddle
2- night Time routine
3- make sure he’s full by giving a few extra ounces before bed
4- put him down and pat him to sleep before him falling asleep in our arms - fail
5- paci
Do we have another option besides sleep training the cry it out way ?🥹🥲. Any advise or info I’d love to hear from you guys. Thank you in advance. I love him to death he’s a really happy baby during the day and when it doesn’t come to sleep. Hate to know I’ll be making him cry if we try the sleep training method but I think we must for both him and us.