Several blog posts ago I talked about how Nate had suddenly decided he no longer needed to sleep at night. He was waking up multiple times throughout the night to feed or to play and nothing I tried seemed to help him stay asleep. This went on for a few weeks until FINALLY he was sleeping from about 8pm-5am. I was so happy with this. I didn’t care if he woke up at 5am to feed because he would fall right back to sleep once he was finished. It was so nice having my sleeping baby back. He seemed much happier during the day too. He was taking his naps like usual and didn’t seem to be miserable anymore. Oh, how I wish I could go back and tell myself “Don’t get too comfortable! Another sleep strike is on its way!”.

Once we came back from New Brunswick, I started having Nate sleep in his room. Up until that point, he had been sleeping in his playpen in our bedroom; not because he needed to but because I needed him to. I’m miserable when woken up during the night and I have a very hard time falling back to sleep once I’m awake so just being able to roll over and pick him up out of the playpen was more convenient for me (yeah, yeah bad mom haha!). So anyways, once we got back from out East, I thought it was time for Nate to go to his room. I anticipated having a lot of transitioning to do since he had been used to being with us but to be honest, the first week was fabulous! I was laughing to myself thinking about how I read all those articles that talked about how to transition your baby and to expect a lot of sleepless nights. But we really didn’t have that. Nate got through the first week wonderfully. Yes, once or twice he woke up 2 or 3 times but he quickly would fall back to sleep. Then, it all changed…

For probably a good two weeks now, he has been horrible when it comes to bedtime. He usually falls asleep fine but as soon as 11pm or midnight roll around, he’s awake and screaming his head off! He cries and cries until I come into his room. At first, I would get into his crib and nurse him, he’d fall back to sleep, then I’d go back to bed until 3:30am when he’d wake up screaming, so again I would nurse him back to sleep, so on and so on. There was one night where I fed him about 4 or 5 times because he kept waking and that’s all he wanted to do. I found myself getting frustrated because I know he doesn’t need all these feeds but I didn’t know what else to do. Eventually at the start of last week, I thought I’d try the ‘cry it out’ method and holy heck did that ever back fire! He screamed bloody murder for about two hours one night before finally conking out and sleeping until almost 9:30am. The next night I thought to myself ‘ok last night wasn’t good but maybe tonight will be better.’ But nope, sure enough it was worse! He screamed at the top of his lungs from 12:30am until close to 4:30am! I even took him for a drive around 3:30 because I couldn’t take it anymore and of course the moment I laid him back in his crib he woke up. It was awful! I was almost in tears because I was so tired and upset with the situation and I felt horrible because Kurt had to work the next morning. To say Thursday night was rough, would be a huge understatement!

Even this weekend, Nate’s sleeping patterns have been so off. He woke up this morning at 6am crying and it was so obvious he was still tired but he would only keep his eyes closed for a minute or two before opening them and screaming. When he finally did fall asleep; he was out until almost 11am! I know there is a huge sleep regression between 8-10 months since babies brains are drastically changing but I find it so unfair that they get over one regression only to have to suffer again a few months later. The poor kid looks exhausted all the time now and he’s constantly yawning all day long! I’m sure we’re both looking forward to the day when his sleep strike ends!