My seven month old is sleep training me. She's got me getting up two to five times a night, and I think she's trying to work me up to six.
When Peter was this age he was already sleep trained pretty well. We did a semi cry-it-out technique with him. I would nurse him at night and if he didn't fall asleep, I would give him 10 minutes of walking or rocking or something to try and soothe him to sleep, and when it didn't work I would let him cry for 10 minutes. Most of the time one of those 10 minute chunks did the trick and got him to sleep.
Peter cried a lot as a baby (he still cries more often than Carolyn does). She will whine and fuss occasionally, but rarely cries. When your baby cries all the time, by the end of the day you feel calloused enough to let them cry for 10 minutes in their bed instead of in your arms.
Now (at 22 months) Peter sleeps like a champ and happily goes down for almost every nap and bedtime. He sleeps 12 hour nights and didn't even get disrupted when Carolyn was born. It made such a huge difference in everyone's well being to sleep train him that I scoffed internally at parents (shaking my head at myself) that couldn't "handle" letting their baby cry it out. It was totally worth a few tears!
And then I had Carolyn. I have tried to let Carolyn cry a few times and I've never lasted more than a couple of minutes. Her cry just breaks my heart. She had been doing really well at putting herself to sleep for quite a while, I could literally just set her down and give her a blanket and she would put herself to sleep. Then something broke a few weeks ago and that's not working so well anymore.
Maybe it's just a sleep regression because she's pretty mobile now and so close to crawling on all fours (she's doing an inch worm thing at the moment). And it seems like for every week of good sleeping, we have a month of a "regression" of some kind.
Getting her down for naps hasn't been incredibly terrible, but putting her down at night has gotten pretty tough. Sometimes it's a couple hours after the first attempt before she's really down for the night. That's a long time to to be patient when your tank is low on gas.
Tonight I decided that something had to be done because she and I are both not sleeping well (more me than her if we're being honest here). I was feeling pretty calloused after trying to put her to bed for an hour for the umpteenth night in a row, so I resolved that I was going to "give her 10 minutes" to cry like I would do with Peter.
I put her down in her crib and I waited the 10 minutes. When I went back into her room she was full-on screaming and picking her up didn't soothe anything (picking Peter up would soothe him almost instantly). I held her and sang to her and shushed her and rocked her and she was still screaming. She finally calmed down when I nursed her again, and even then she paused a couple of times to scream some more. That was the worst thing ever. To have my hardly-ever-cry baby screaming like that was the worst.
I don't think crying is going to be the method for this one.
If there's anything that having two kids has taught me is that every kid really IS different, and what worked on one is not going to work on another.
I never really looked into "no cry" solutions with Peter because that was so "hahahaha yeah right, no cry, mmm k". But I think I'm going to start looking into it now.
I'd love to hear about any of your successes!Labels: Motherhood