Totally clueless!?!

Worst night's sleep ever! Ok, maybe not ever, but worst in quite a while. Josiah woke up at 11pm for no real reason and settled back to sleep again reasonably well but decided to talk to himself loudly in the process thus waking up both parents. He woke again at 12:30am wanting to eat. Then he woke again at 4:30am and wouldn't settle so I fed him again. I was so tired I fed him lying down. Apparently he was tired too and fell asleep eating. Due to his unsettled sleep I decided to let him stay asleep in our bed instead of waking him to put him in his own bed. As I rolled away from him to get comfy ready to go back to sleep he decided to sprawl out and take up my entire side of the bed! This left my husband and I just half the bed for the both of us to sleep in. He was not too impressed at having his sleep space invaded at 5am.

We were even less impressed when Josiah woke up again at 6:30am. I tried to resettle him in his own bed but he was having none of it so I caved in and fed him again. Add to all the night waking the fact that I have a stinking cold preventing me from getting to sleep and mastitis making feeding very painful and you'll see it was really not a fun night!

The thing that annoys me most is that just a few weeks ago he was going 6-8 hours between feeds at night - not every night but at least 50% of the time. Why is he now going only 4 hours between feeds?! What am I doing wrong? At first I put it down to a growth spurt but it's been a couple of weeks now.

This parenting thing is hard work and I feel so clueless. It used to be so much more straight forward - let him sleep as long as he wants, feed him as soon as he wakes, change him, put him straight back to bed - simple. Now it's so much more complicated. He wants to be awake so much more and it's a careful balance trying to give him enough sleep but not so much he doesn't sleep at night. I think I know roughly how many feeds he needs and how much sleep but can't seem to work out how to coordinate the two. This week there has been plenty of crying because we've tried to put him to sleep when he wanted to play more. And there has been crying because we've woken him up to feed him while he still really needed sleep. (Kinda his own fault for staying up chatting for 45 mins before going to sleep instead of taking the opportunity to nap). We'd previously got into a nice little routine that worked well but the kid is constantly growing and changing and so are his needs. It's so hard to keep up!

Please somebody tell me this parenting thing gets easier right?!