We’ve been working with a sleep consultant for the last couple weeks doing ‘gentle’ sleep training...basically a version of the sleep lady shuffle. We made it through all 9 freakin nights of staying in the room at bed and night wakes and DS (8.5 months) has successfully been putting himself to sleep and sleeping through for the past week. He wakes usually at 5:20/5:30 which isn’t great and the trainer wants us to not get him out of bed til 6, but I can deal with waking after 5 if he sleeps through. We wait 10 mins before responding to him now.

Besides day 1 and 2, he hasn’t had any night wakings. UNTIL last night (night 11) He was up crying with 10 min checks from 3 am to 4:45, slept 45, then woke up for good at 5:30. I have no clue WTF happened but I’m feeling really discouraged and upset since he was doing so well. We are supposed to go visit my parents this weekend out of town and I’m panicking we will all be up all night and wake everyone up.

The trainer has been suggesting for a couple days to switch his bedtime bottle to before bath instead of after to see if that helps with the early wakings. We’ve been reluctant to change it up because it WAS working. Now I don’t know what to do or whether I should change anything. We are supposed to keep communicating with her for another 3 days but we were actually going to tell her today that we were all good and happy to just be on our own now!

Questions:
-does anyone do the order of bottle, bath, bed? I’m worried he will be all wired up if we do that or won’t eat as much. He is fully awake going into the crib for nap and night and no paci, only his lovey.
-could this be the dreaded extinction burst? I didn’t think it happened this ‘late’?
-I guess I’m naive but I thought from what our trainer said that sleep will usually just get better and better. A quick wake here and there but not like what happened last night. After sleep training, did you have HORRIBLE nights still every so often? (Besides extenuating circumstances like illness and teething)
-did you have to re-train from the very start? I’m dreading this because it freaking sucked.

I’m looking for commiseration and also WWYD in my shoes?