Hush Little Baby

I'm really starting to think Xander has some kind of sleep disorder. He has never been a good sleeper. He woke up every 4 hours for the first 9 months of his life. He never regularly napped twice a day. He wouldn't nap at all by himself until right before his first birthday, until then he only napped if I held him the whole time. He still isn't sleeping through the night. I thought he was, because I was sleeping through the night and he doesn't usually cry when he wakes up. We have a video monitor on him and I don't sleep with the sound on because it keeps me awake, and I can hear him clearly through the wall so it seems pointless. I do keep the video on tho, so whenever I roll over during the night I peek at him and then go back to sleep. Usually he's sleeping when I look at the monitor, but lately I've been getting up much more frequently to use the potty during the night thanks to Ethan kicking my bladder all night. This has lead me to notice that quite frequently Xander will be sitting in the corner of his crib during the night. We co-slept for the first 5 months and I knew he was a restless sleeper. When we moved, back when he was about 8 months old we co-slept again for a short time, while we were staying with family before we got our house, and I had noticed him occasionally sitting up out of a deep sleep and talking (babbling) for a few seconds and then laying back down. I had chalked it up to him being disturbed by Ed's snoring or me moving. Now I'm starting to notice that he does it very often during the night, and frequently he isn't just sitting up for a second, but rather he seems to be in a state between being awake and asleep and he sits there like that from anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours. I've seen him go as long as 3 hours just sitting in the same spot, eyes open but not really moving. Occasionally he'll nod off and his head slumps over for a second before he jerks it back up, or he'll wiggle his toes or stretch his leg, but mostly he's very still. Most of the time he will lay back down eventually and go back to sleep. The last week that Ed was out to sea he was ending these episodes by screaming, and the only way to get him back to sleep was to go change his diaper, give him a sippy cup of milk (not in his bed, he isn't that spoiled), hug him and tuck him back in his crib. I hate doing that, I know it only encourages the behavior I'm trying to avoid, but at 5am I'm too exhausted to listen to him scream, and he's never been one to cry it out, he's very stubborn. My attempts with the CIO method were very short lived when he was a newborn because even then he could scream for over an hour without showing any signs of letting up and it broke my heart to let him go longer than that. Besides that, when he wakes up shrieking out of one of his sitting up looking awake episodes at 5am, even tho the bitch in me doesn't want to get out of bed and would love to be heartless enough to just let him cry it out, the mommy in me can't help but think that since he hasn't eaten anything or been changed in 9 hours maybe he actually needs those things. Most of the time I was finding that he had peed through his diaper a little, and changing him was necessary. I even believed that this was the cause of his waking up and went out and bought overnight diapers. They are working great, he is no longer getting up feeling wet, but he's still getting up. Now I'm also starting to notice that he is spending a very long time just sitting in his crib when we put him to bed. He has a stuffed toy lion that he sleeps with and he will quietly play with that for over an hour before actually falling asleep. His bedtime is 8pm, and when we put him down he seems tired. Why he isn't sleeping is really starting to bug me. He only takes an hour nap, sometimes an hour and a half if I'm really lucky, in the early afternoon. I've thought about cutting it out, but he had other ideas and put himself down for a nap on the living room floor when I didn't take him to his crib at nap time. I'm at my wits end. In 2 months Ethan will be here, I'm not expecting to get any sleep then, but I sure was hoping to get some before then. I feel like I'm not doing enough for Xander, but I think all I can do for now is start keeping a sleep diary for him so I can ask his pediatrician about it at his next check up. I know that kids his age frequently go through phases of not sleeping through the night. I guess it just bothers me that it seems like he's never really been a good sleeper, and I keep waiting for him to outgrow his problems. At this point I'm starting to wonder if instead of helping him by trying to wait till he out grows it, am I really hurting him by not teaching him a solution?