10 month old not sleeping. Losing it.

FTM here. So for context, my daughter has never been a good sleeper from day 1. I think the longest stretch she’s ever slept was 4 hours and that was one time. She had horrible colic when she was 2 months old, took her to the chiropractor a few times and no issues with gas since. After the 4 month sleep regression, she was sleeping 2-3 hour stretches at night. We co-sleep and she uses breastfeeding as her sleep association to get back to sleep. Out of desperation a few months ago we tried the Ferber method to get her to sleep solo in the crib. 2 days in a row she didn’t sleep at all and nearly busted blood vessels in her eyes from crying so much so we gave up. I do not want to sleep train. Fast forward to now. Around 7.5 months she started waking even more at night and for hours at a time. She’s completely happy but she’s up for 3-5 hours in the middle of the night. We get her in bed between 7-8pm, she’s up between 11pm-12am and then won’t fall back asleep until 3-5am. Then she wants to sleep until 1-2pm and she’s exhausted the entire next day so her wake windows are only 1.5-2 hours MAX because she’s rubbing her eyes and fussy and just exhausted. I’ve tried to wake her up earlier in the day to get her back on her “schedule” but then she just starts rubbing her eyes and fussing within 30 min of waking her up. She could nap for 3 hours if I let her but I never let her go past the 2 hour mark.

I haven’t left my house in months. The one time I did with her she was crying SO hard because she was exhausted and we had been out of the house for longer than an hour. We can’t go anywhere or do anything because as soon as she shows signs of being tired we have to put her down. She won’t even fall asleep for dad anymore and will only nap if I lay down with her and nurse her. It’s negatively impacted all of my friendships and family relationships because I can’t take her to see anyone or do anything. I feel like I’m doing something wrong. Her pediatrician wants me to sleep train but I’m not willing to do that.

Update: My girl is now almost 16 months. Thanks to the awesome recommendations, I looked into the possums method. It talks about building up enough “sleep pressure” for baby to be tired enough to sleep. Here’s some things I gathered: 1. Wake up baby at the same time every day! Immediately get her by a window with sunlight. 2. Never cap her naps. Some days, she naps for 3.5 hours. Other days it’s 20 minutes. I try my best not to stress about the length of her naps. I used to spend an hour trying to nurse her back to sleep after a short nap and it never worked. Now I just get her up and accept that her body knows when she needs rest. If we go out and she falls asleep in the car, I’m not stressing about keeping her awake until we get home. If she needed that 5-10 minutes of rest, so be it. 3. If we eat dinner earlier that day, she gets a bedtime snack. I don’t stress too much about the time of her going to sleep. It’s always somewhere between 8-9. Some days she wants to stay up until 10. It can be frustrating but I have to remind myself that she will sleep eventually.

Most of all, the possums method taught me that babies are biologically wired to not sleep through the night. For those of you that have a baby/toddler that does, that’s awesome. But most of my mom friends (myself included) don’t have that. And there’s NOTHING wrong with your kiddo if they don’t. Once I let go of those societal expectations and just embraced my baby, I was actually able to enjoy motherhood. We cosleep, breastfeed (to sleep, too!) and still have night wakes. I try to block out the people (mostly my mother) that tell me my kid isn’t normal and is too “needy”. There’s nothing wrong with my baby, or yours. ❤️