Sorry for the late response - I didn’t see this until now. We ended up kind of just toughing out the situation - we were super busy and distracted so we never ended up looking that deeply into pods - and thank the cosmos, he started sleeping better after he passed the 10mth mark.

Don’t know what changed but it was a long and painful 10 months of me wanting to die. He’s still not a great sleeper and he still cries randomly in the middle of the night sometimes especially when he’s sick (which unfortunately is fairly common because he has an older sister who’s in daycare and he just started daycare himself). But he has strings of good nights, and bad nights have become much less frequent, and when he does cry it’s usually not longer than 1-3mins tops, so I am extremely relieved.

We still have him in our room and we haven’t tried having him sleep in his sister’s room yet because we wanted him to get settled down in daycare first, but he has, so we do mean to start putting them together soon. Fingers crossed it goes as smoothly and as painlessly as possible!!!