Day 114 - Running on empty

I'm sorry, my dear readers, but there will be no photos today. No videos. No sound recordings. If you aren't interested in the plaints of an exhausted mother, you can go now. But in place of my venting you could read this, which is fantastic: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/una-lamarche/how-to-be-a-perfect-parent_b_2888253.html

So here's the story:

Within a week after turning 2 months, Augie started sleeping very well - 6-7 hours for the first sleep, followed by 4-6 hours for the second (that's 10-13 hours per night!). He did this on his own without any sort of sleep training from us. It was fantastic.

About 3 weeks ago now, when he was just over 3 months old, he started waking every 3 hours. As you can guess, this was difficult to adjust to. I would try to soothe him when I felt he didn't need to eat, and I would nurse him when it seemed he did. We guessed this had to do with some combination of teething (even if they aren't about to break the skin, they're always pushing upward and can cause this kind of disturbance well before they cut through, is what I've learned) and developmental leaps: he has gotten very, very close to rolling over (easily rolls to his side now, it seems that he'll flip all the way over soon), and he has also become quite social and aware of the world, especially his parents. So we assumed that his sleep would settle as he became accustomed to these things.

Beginning 2 nights ago, he's been waking much, much, much more frequently at night: usually either every 45 minutes or 1.5 hours or so (though he may have slept for 2.5 hours at one point last night). It's awful. It's worse than when he was fresh from the womb - he slept better than this as a newborn! We don't think we've changed anything: in fact, weeks ago we started trying to get a bedtime routine in place so that we could avoid just this circumstance. Too, when he wakes at night, it is fairly sudden and with a new urgency, often as though he is in a panic. He is sometimes inconsolable for a few minutes. I try to shush and rock/walk him back to sleep, but offer the breast when it seems he needs it.

We can't figure out how he went from being able to link his sleep cycles on his own and sleep most of the night to not being able to at all and waking so frequently. Is it teething? Is it a growth spurt? Did we f&*k up something? I know sleep regression is normal around this time, but this seems far beyond regression. Last night he was up for a full hour between 5am and 6am - he has NEVER been awake that long overnight. (Though he was mostly happy all that time, so that's something). Other parents, have you ever seen a regression this bad? What the heck can we do to help him get back on the right track?