DS is about 6.5 months now and I finally gave in to CIO a week ago. We have a bedtime routine - dinner (cereal for him) with us, bath, song, sleep sack, nurse (he stays awake), and then bed. We seemed to have made some progress with the initial falling asleep and he does cry less, but he still has a ton of trouble staying asleep and had an awful night yesterday. Before we started CIO, I was nursing every time he woke up (1.5-2.5 hrs) to get him back to sleep and oversleeping in an attempt to do anything i could to get some sleep, so I still feed him at his first waking after 10pm and 2am. We do a check in after 15 minutes now, so we hadnt had to go in there after the first night until last night, twice. We're not nap training right now and is a terrible napper, fights it and naps only about 45 minutes most the time (occasionally 20 min or a little over an hour if we're lucky) so his awake time is only about 1.5 hours, but there isnt really a distinguishable nap schedule at all. He nurses when waking up from a nap so he's not used to nursing to sleep during the day, though we do rock and up until about 1 or 2 weeks ago, I'd been laying down with him to nap for about a month.

I feel like I've created a sleep monster by taking the "easy" way out until now and just doing whatever I can to get him to sleep. I was told by SOOOOOO many people, just do CIO, it worked for us in 3 days, or a week tops was what everyone boasted to me. Are they over embellishing? Forgot the pain already? Am I doing something royally wrong still? Is this sleep habit "normal"?? Does it just take longer sometimes? Not a single person told me it took them longer than a week. Heeeeeelp!!

ETA: bottom chart is the same, just reshaped it so the numbers were more readable.