My DS has been waking more and more during the night, needing to be nursed back to sleep. We can instead rock him or cuddle him back to sleep, but that takes thirty minutes or so, opposed to nursing's few minutes. The last two nights he's woken every half-hour or hour.
We co-sleep and are not willing to put him in the other room in his crib (that will come with time, easing into it), and CIO is not for us. We actually tried a few weeks ago to just hold him in bed until he screamed out all his energy and fell back asleep, after over a week of Daddy taking him and rocking him back to sleep, but the next day he was extremely clingy and he'd never before been clingy at all. Our inattentiveness was obviously not well-taken. So we went back to just nursing him back to sleep because my boyfriend can't get up with him every time he wakes up, forever.
Anyone else going through something similar or have any suggestions? CIO is not an option, or anything that could cause him to trust us less and become more clingy. Nursing him back to sleep eight times a night isn't pleasant, but I'd choose that for a while over lasting effects of not answering his cry to the best of our abilities. I know holding him and/ or rocking him are not CIO, but we tried that for a week with no improvement at all, and it actually was detrimental, so that option is now not too favored.
I think we probably just have to stick it out until he's old enough for us to explain that he needs to go back to sleep on his own, so if anyone wants to commiserate on this, feel free!