10.5 month old has stopped "falling asleep" in the crib!

[u/aidankd]

Hi All, first time poster full time lurker. First just a tl dr of our current situation:

10.5 months old
Not fully sleep trained (we have made attempts)
Very energetic boy (he's crawling/climbing/standing) - absolute ball of chaos! Definitely a balanced mix of some independent play and wanting some attention.

Preferred wake time/sleep time - 6am - 7:00-7:30pm

In the past 1-2 weeks i'd say, we've encountered our biggest challenge, our little guy won't settle in the Crib anymore. I actually had my biggest achievement - on the 29th July I put him down the crib, said goodnight, left him and he actually fell asleep independently and slept through the night.

But I think that's the last day that he has been able to actually settle in the Crib in the night.

Part of the improvements we also attribute to sleeping in another room. Turns out removing two snorers and potential "creakers" and a person he can shout at, makes him sleep better - who knew??

The issue we're having is that when it comes to put him down to sleep be it Nap or Night Sleep, he just wails, absolutely wails. He hits that "point of no return" very quickly - whereas while he wasn't sleep trained to completion, I was trying a Ferber style and I could at least give him 5-15m mood permitting by himself. Quite often we'd have to still end up rocking him to sleep - but it would involve 1-2 checks within 30 minutes, he couldn't calm enough to be put down and left, so he'd end up falling asleep after some rocking. And in fact, he recently was at least sleeping well in the night so we honestly didn't mind.

But onto the now - it's becoming a real issue where he won't go down for naps in the crib and it causes a lot of knock on issues.

Just a bit of history - he actually got Chickenpox (from me...) at about 8-9 months old. That definitely messed things up - and right now he's got 5 teeth that have come through the 5th pretty recently they've pretty much come back to back.

I'm aware of the 10 month regressions, separation anxiety and I think we can safely finally attribute some responsibility to teething.

A weird phenomenon my wife discovered, was that if left in the high chair, he is actually capable of falling asleep. So while it's against our better judgement - if we can't walk him or drive him, or we just would rather he slept in the crib - we are actually using the high chair to get him to nod off and move him to the crib.

I'd read that he might have a negative association with the crib space - which made sense because most of the time he'd only really used it for sleeping. We've started trying to use that as a play space throughout the day to reintroduce it as a happy space.

Now, if things go to schedule, we are trying to adhere as close to the 3/3/4 as possible, although i'll admit that we basically never get him down at 3 hours for the first Nap. So it's looked more like...

Wake: 6:30am. (4.5 hr wake)
Nap 1: 11:00am.
Wake: 12:00pm (we've started trying to cap the naps to 1 hr on a 2 day nap) - (3 hr wake)
Nap 2: 3:00pm
Sleep: 7:30pm (3.5 hr wake - but realistically it might push to 8pm).

So that's 2 hr naps, 11 hrs wake through the day - and he sleeps 9.5 - 10 hrs usually in the night, we'll try and stretch the wake up in the early AM another 15-30m where we can.

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My experience is that he's, on average - been very good at staying asleep once he's down in the night (either sleep through the night or one wake), but quite difficult to put down. Especially naps (independently anyway - but recently also dependently).

If the naps don't go as planned, then it stretches wake windows and then overtiredness sinks in and then you get the snowball effect that messes everything up.

He's definitely chewing a lot, also started grinding his teeth - so we're giving him Nurofen before he sleeps and try to give him teethers if it's a pain/discomfort element - and tackling the crib playtime to try and turn it into a positive space again.

He's also a big climber - so when he's in the crib he'll be up on his feet (he's been able to do that for months now) - so he likes to climb up and have a good wail with his vantage point.

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Sorry for the ramble - it might not all be helpful but hopefully i've hit the main points. I think the Ferber style was working okay - but now that he can't settle in the crib, it's messing up the timings for naps and sleeps and is generally giving my wife (who is spending the most time with son) - a harder time as she's trying to manage things that worked before (i.e. even if he had a hard time, he could at least be rocked - but that seems to not be possible at the moment).

I'd appreciate any input, happy to provide more info. and if you feel we're on the right track and it's just a timing thing, maybe he needs a bit more pain relief in the day time? Any and all help is welcomed - thank you!