Posted by bex on November 04, 2007 at 14:04:56:My little boy is one year old next week and has never slept through the night. He is very good at initially getting himself to sleep, I made a point of teaching him to do that when he was just a few weeks old and he has been brilliant. He has one or two sleeps a day - kind of on the cusp of transitioning to one but occasionally still two and he sleeps from about 6 or 6.30 at night until about 6.30 in the morning. However, during those 12 hours, he does wake quite a few times - maybe about 6 or 7 and and sometimes up to 20! As soon as I give him his dummy (pacifier), he goes straight back to sleep, so it is a fleeting disruption but he screams like he is being stabbed until I get that dummy in! I have tried putting a few dummies around him in the cot, so he can find them easily and stick one in himself but he doesn't seem to try to find them - just screams and then straight back to sleep when I give him his dummy. His big sister (who is now three and a half and slept through at 14 weeks) never had a dummy at all but the midwife recommended it for our boy to help a sore tummy as an infant - so I wonder how much of our problem it due to his love of the dummy? Since the day he was born, he has had this ear-splitting scream. In the first 3 months, it was so excrutiatingly intense that your ear drums would fluctuate and cut out, unable to deal with the pitch and volume. No-one we knew had heard anything like it. We had people say 'Oh yes, all babies really scream sometimes' and then they would hear him and just look flabbergasted and utter some expletive and head into the garden for some aural relief! However, it was only ever fleeting and he was always easy to pacify. It is far less intense now but there is still no build up when he wakes through the night - he just erupts and is rigid and tense when I get to him but immediately mollified by the dummy and a pat. He was 10lb at birth and was born very fast, so it may be possible he has some latent little discomfort that is exacerbated when he lies down or sleeps? (I have an appt with a cranial osteopath for him in a few weeks). He does have a good bedtime routine and doesn't mind being put to bed and goes off to sleep really well on his own - no worries there. I don't feed him through the night or need to get him up when he wakes. I am not worried about him going through periods of a few days where he wakes but every night for a year is wearing me out. I have tried 'controlled crying' but he really gets into a state and then it takes us AGES to get him back to sleep - it seems so much easier just to nip in at the start and he goes back to sleep quickly but I am exhausted with over a year of very little (and ALWAYS broken) sleep. Any suggestions gratefully accepted. Thank you - Rebecca