Hello! I'm new to these boards, and very desperate...

We sleep-trained our 18mo with the Mindell method, which says that if you do the initial bedtime training, baby will eventually stop waking at night. We were very consistent about our bedtime routine, but still it took two months for him to go down with no crying at all (we did this with or other son a few years ago and it took him four nights!). Now we want to work on the middle-of-the-night wakings. He sometimes sleeps through, but the nights he does wake up, it's terrible. We haven't been really consistent at these wakeups, but for awhile we were letting him CIO and he would go back to sleep after 10-15 minutes. Then we had some setbacks (extended houseguests, he was sick, etc) and got into the habit of taking him to bed with us, and now we want to break that habit, but...

He has become super persistent, and will cry (on again, off again) for hours. Our neighbor's bedroom is on the other side of the wall, and it is keeping them up as well (which is one reason why we haven't been able to just let him go on and on consistently.) Since he does sleep through some nights, the momentum is lost, and it feels like we're starting over each time.

I know we will probably have to just bite the bullet and do some kind of very consistent nighttime method, but was wondering if there was anything we should do differently in the face of his extreme persistence, the neighbor factor, and the fact that he took so long to adjust to the initial bedtime and naps with no crying.

And to see if anyone else has had a similar situation.

Thanks!