This is going to be WAY more info than the average person wants to read, so you've been warned now and can stop reading! (Although I’ve actually found a lot of what I’ve learned very interesting!) So, we were so lucky the first couple months to get a baby that was an awesome sleeper, so for that I’m thankful. As I’ve mentioned lightly on here, since about 3 months we’ve had some issues with getting him to sleep through the night. He always goes to bed initially wonderfully, but some nights would wake 5 times throughout the night. Luckily it doesn’t happen every night, but often enough that it was completely wearing us out. At first we made excuses like “Oh he has such a bad cold and cough” or “this is just a phase a lot of babies go through and it will pass.” I’ve recently read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Baby and Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems. Both were good, but I HIGHLY recommend Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems by Dr. Ferber- it was a quick read for me and really put things into a good perspective and convinced me we needed to take action and that this was the right approach. Below is my summary of our issues and how I applied the books:
Going to Bed Routine
So our putting to bed routine had been shaping up as:
1) Take bath (usually takes about 20 minutes)
2) Have bottle in family room (usually takes another 20 minutes)
3) Go to nursery and swaddle him
4) Put him in crib, white noise is playing, also play his seahorse lullaby music (the last week of April we were successful getting him sleeping without the Nap Nanny and just using towels to elevate the mattress)
After reading the book, we are doing mostly everything correct. He has the same routine every night so knows what to expect. He is almost always awake when we put him in the crib, so he knows where he is going to sleep at and there are no surprises in the middle of the night when he wakes. Only a handful of times has he cried after putting him down and we always let him cry it out (CIO) and is usually just a few minutes. He most likely has sleep associations developed with the swaddling, white noise, and possibly needing the bottle. These can be okay cause they signal sleep to him, but can be bad if he 100% MUST have them in order to sleep and they become a pain for you.
For us, the only things we are changing with our putting to bed routine is to stop the swaddle and give him his bottle in the nursery rather than the family room. The reason to change where we give the bottle is possibly more geared towards older babies, but it’s so he will associate going to his room for bedtime as more pleasant since he gets the bottle in there. When we give it in the family room and he’s upset cause it’s all done, then we go to the bedroom and it can feel like a negative. We debated up until the final seconds if we were going to stop the swaddle or continue. The book convinced us to stop the swaddle now by saying that babies can adapt very quickly to change and it is better to make all the changes at once rather than slowly. So if we go through several nights of this CIO program with him swaddled….then a few weeks later when we stop the swaddling, we will probably have to go through all this again.
So now our putting to bed routine looks like:
1) Take bath (usually takes about 20 minutes)
2) Have bottle in nursery (usually takes another 20 minutes)
3) Put him in crib, white noise is playing, also play his seahorse lullaby music
Middle of Night Wakings
When he fusses during the night we usually go into his room within the first minute of crying and give him his pacifier—lately, he immediately takes it and will suck on it…but then he’ll no doubt lose it and start crying, so then I gotta be on standby to replace it. So I’ll usually be in his room for 20 minutes until I know he’s asleep or not going to lose it anymore. Then we have some nights where he just won’t take the pacifier and it is close to morning, so we move him to the swing. This way he stops crying and we can get a couple hours more sleep.
For the middle of the night waking, we are doing everything wrong! First, we should not be rushing in during the first minute- this is not even giving him a chance to go back to sleep. And he obviously knows how to put himself to sleep cause he does it initially when going to bed. Secondly, we give him the pacifier. So now he knows that when he wakes during the night and cries that we’ll come soothe him by bringing him the pacifier and helping him back to sleep…there is really nothing wrong with this, except we want our sleep! So our goal is that when he wakes, he no longer will cry, but just comfort himself and return to sleep.
So, Dr. Ferber claims that by following some simple steps that in just a few nights you can teach your child to self-soothe and go back to sleep on his own.
For the middle of the night wakings, we will no longer giving him the pacifier at all and are using a progressive waiting technique. With progressive waiting, each night you let him cry for a set number of minutes- then you enter the room and just talk to him a little to assure him that you did not abandon him. You do NOT pick him up though or try to get him to go to sleep or soothe him…it’s solely to reassure him that you are still around. And expect that they will in fact cry HARDER when you leave the room each time. In no more than a minute, you leave the room. You now let him cry for another set number of minutes, but slightly lengthen it from the first interval. This continues until he stops crying. So our plan for night one looked like: Wait 3 minutes when first starts crying, go reassure him, let him cry 5 minutes, go reassure him, now let him cry 10 minutes, reassure him...and just continue doing this every 10 minutes. Then night 2 we would move to: Wait 5 minutes when first starts crying, go reassure him, let him cry 10 minutes, go reassure him, now let him cry 12 minutes. The same parent should continue to go in for each interval until he goes back to sleep and wakes again- then it is okay to change. Also, it recommends NOT going into the room at the interval if the child has started to calm down himself- seeing and hearing you will probably just make him more upset and cause more harm than good.
So we've been doing this for 1 week and here are the results! Night one we were expecting it to be HORRIBLE and that we'd take shifts. Lachlan woke at 11pm and started wailing at 11:15. I went in 3 minutes later to reassure him, which I really think did NO good cause he was crying so hard I don't think he could hear my meek voice saying, "honey, it's okay....i'm right here....just go back to sleep." I then laid in the guest room across the hall watching him on the video monitor waiting for 5 minutes to pass, which felt more like 50 minutes. So I go back in and do the same routine and force myself to leave after like 30 seconds. Now I have to wait 10 whole minutes before going back in! At this point he starts getting super angry and seems to be the first time I've seen him throw a tantrum of sorts- he takes both legs and just starts smacking them down as hard as he can on the mattress. I've never seen him so worked up (and this kid has cried A LOT)! I'm thinking there is no way he will just stop crying and I'm probably going to have to wake Dustin up at some point cause I won't know what to do. The book says nearly all kids will stop within an hour, but there are a few select who can make it past that hour mark....and I just know Lachlan is probably one of those "select" few! Anyways, about 8 minutes into the waiting, he starts to wind down to more whimpers and settling down a bit. So I get to 10 minutes and decide not to go in there since he isn't crying so hard anymore. Then at the 11 minute mark he just stops crying and goes to sleep. Just like someone flipped a switch!
The rest of the night there was NO crying. He woke at 6am and did not cry- just laid happily in his crib until we came and got him 15 minutes later. So we think either that one crying it out session really did the trick OR this was just some fluke that he was so good after that. Well, 6 nights later, we have yet to have any more crying episodes during the night. This was completely amazing and worked a million times better than I had thought- I feel like we are all so much happier with getting good sleep. I still will wake during the night cause I hear him rustling about, but he won't cry and he'll just figure it out himself how to go back to sleep-- the one night he was up for 30 minutes at 3am just trying to get comfy and go back to sleep...but no crying!
The book says this method will usually work in about 3-4 nights to get them sleeping all on their own, but I was not expecting it to take less than 1 night of work! I can't recommend this method enough and we'll definitely be using this on any future kids!!!
