7pm to 2am sounds pretty good to me. Sleeping seven hours in a row at that age is considered sleeping through the night. Go to bed when he goes to bed? You could try to rock him back to sleep instead of nursing him, but most babies will not sleep for 12 hours without waking up at all. How many adults sleep all night without waking up? Eventually he'll sleep all the way through the night (age 2-4) and be able to get himself back to sleep when he does wake up. He's a baby and needs to know that his parents are there when he wakes up.

Bourbon.

If your kid is just waking up (not hungry, not distressed, not wallowing in his own filth), then leave him alone in his crib to sleep. It's not mean to let him learn to self pacify if he's bored with being in bed, and you'll be able to sleep better yourselves, which is more important than you think. Yes, it will suck in the short term, but just leave him be and he'll learn to go back to sleep on his own. Otherwise, he's just going to continue to expect you to always pick him up/nurse him/sing songs/etc. if he's awoken or bored.

So yeah, suck it up and sleep train him--if you're already stressed and exhausted yourselves, how is letting him cry it out going to be any worse? The kid's not dying/puking/hungry, just bored (and I'm sure you can hear the difference between bored and distressed cries). He'll learn to deal, as will you.

However, expecting an infant to sleep for 12 solid hours is a bit much. Could you move his bedtime back a bit at a time so that his 7-8 hours of sleep coincides with yours? He can nap during the day--I'm betting you can't.

"We thought that things would gradually improve to a 7pm-7am sleep with no wake ups, but here we are at 10 month and it's not any better."

Well, heck. Someone's gone and made you think baby raising's easy. Kick them, hard, in the shin for me, and remind yourselves often of the truths: "we'll never sleep again, all babies are different, and ours is about average".

However, the "letting the baby sleep in your bed" thing will bite you in the ass when your sex life wants to come rearing back from the dead - I highly recommend putting the kibosh on that habit ASAP. If anything, THAT'S the thing you should be letting baby 'cry out' about.

All babies need to learn to 'sleep'. Either the caretakers teach them or they find a sleep pattern on their own. We didn't CIO (cry it out), we simply enacted a sleep time and routine (as well as a flexible nursing/food schedule), that we enforced on ourselves (parents) without many variations. Babies need clues to be reinforced to feel 'safe' and fall asleep. Our child will NOT sleep for more than 8 hours, so we settled on a bed time of 10pm to 6am, nursing/bottles every 3 hours from 6am to 9pm. After the baby feeding at 6am, morning routine, diaper change and a bit of play in the crib, she sleeps from 7am to 8:30am, without prompting or supervision.

This routine began at 3 months and continues into her 7th month. She regularly naps during the day, which is very important, if she is to fall asleep promptly at 10pm. Check out the literature on baby sleep/child development at the Library, it was very informative and helpful to us.