DS is 6 months old and his sleep has always been up and down but I had hoped it would settle by now. Unfortunately, he had a growth spurt about 3 weeks ago and his sleep got really terrible again. Pre-growth spurt, he would wake 1-2x to eat, then go right back down. The growth spurt was about a week long, and he would eat 3-4x but still go back down easily. Then he started waking more frequently and it was harder to get him back to sleep. It got to the point where he was waking about 6x per night.

It seemed like a classic nursing to sleep association, but I was already putting him to bed awake to start the night, so we moved his final nursing session to before his bath to give about 20 min of time between nursing and bedtime. He was totally fine with that change (still goes to sleep on his own without a peep) and it didn't help the wakings.

So we tried using cry it out for the night wakings, except for 2 times when I would nurse him. The first 3 nights, he woke 6x and cried 5-10 min each time. Nights 4-5 were great and he was basically back to normal. Night 6 got a little worse again, and last night he was up 7x and his crying was worse then ever. Plus he was up at 4:30am the past few days.

Is this an extinction burst? Or am I missing something? He is not sick or teething, and I don't think he needs to nurse more. His naps are crappy and short but he goes down awake for those too. He still takes 3 or 4 per day.

The only other thing DH can think of is that we sometimes bring him into our bed in the morning when he is up super early (like 5am). We don't want to use cry it out at that time of day so DH wants to just get up with him if he's awake then. But I'd prefer he sleep later and not learn to start the day so early.

Hoping to see if anyone has thoughts or advice. I feel like there is literally nothing else I can do to help him at this point.