Because I Said So
My life as a Mom

And after the first night, seems to be a success (knock wood).  Pickle fell asleep at 8:30 after about 45 minutes of crying, woke up at 1 and cried for another hour, then slept until 7 and woke up in the best mood I’ve seen him in ages first thing in the morning.  (He had been in the habit of waking up at 5:30am screaming.  Waking up at 7am quietly babbling is a massive improvement.)

Our downstairs neighbors haven’t left us any nasty notes, so either they prefer the sound of a crying baby to the sound of our rocking chair or they’ve simply decided never to speak with us again.  Ah well, c’est la vie.

Fingers are crossed that tonight will involve shorter periods of crying and continue the trend of waking only once (or not at all!) and sleeping until at least 6:30 and waking up happy.  Hm. I think I need more fingers.

For posterity, here is the sleep training method we’re using (a modified Ferber based on babycenter.com’s outline):

1- Bedtime routine as normal (bath, story + bottle), then we put him down in the crib with a pacifier, say goodnight, and leave.

2- After 3 minutes of crying, go in and soothe without picking him up (except as necessary to lay him back down if he’s standing up). Leave once he’s calmed down after no more than 2-3 minutes.

3- Repeat as necessary increasing the lag time with each interval using a schedule of 3,3,5,5,8,8,10,10,12,12,15+

4- After 3 nights, if the training seems to be working, increase the first interval to 5 minutes and gradually work up to teaching him to fall asleep completely on his own.

Last night (the first night using this method) he fell asleep after the second 8-minute interval.  When he woke up at 1, he fell asleep after the first 10-minute one.  As I said above, fingers are crossed that tonight will be easier.

One thing I think we will *definitely* need to do is get some breathable crib bumpers to stop him dropping the paci over the side - if he can reach it, he can put it back in his mouth, but if it’s on the floor he’s out of luck.  Eventually we’ll wean him of the paci altogether, but I’m not going to rush that, at least not at night.

Philosophically, I had been pretty opposed to sleep training until very recently.  I felt that the concept of “self-soothing” was bullshit and that leaving a baby to cry only teaches him that if he cries you won’t come.  Now having been through a night of it, I feel differently.  One big difference is that at 10 months old, Pickle understands that when we leave the room, we’re just out in the hallway.  If we’d tried this method before he understood object permanence, we’d be dealing with a baby who thinks that when we leave the room, we cease to exist, and that still strikes me as a pretty horrible scenario.  Currently when we leave and he cries, it’s because he’s confused and pissed off, and not because he’s terrified that he’s alone in the world forever - *much* easier to deal with when you’re standing outside the door waiting for the clock to hit that three-minute mark!

Ultimately, I still think kids will sleep how they sleep, but I’m willing to admit now that using that as an excuse for complacency is not a healthy attitude.  If this sleep-training works, it will be because Pickle was ready for it, and we were observant enough to take advantage of an opportunity to teach him better sleep habits.  It’s been obvious that he’s been sleeping as poorly as we have the past few weeks - rocking him to sleep has been getting increasingly unwieldy as he’s grown taller, and he obviously *wants* to sleep better, but can’t quite get comfortable and relax into it.  It’s clear that he’s more comfortable in his own bed where he can stretch out and roll around and fall asleep in whatever position he wants.  So all we’re doing now is getting him past that hurdle where he needs both to have us there holding him *and* to be in his crib stretched out because it’s not physically possible to do both. I feel really good about this. I hope I still do by Friday.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 8:44 am and is filed under Sleep. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.