When asked by my boss what I had planned for this weekend, I mentioned sleep training Ethan. "Ohhhhhhhhh. We'll see how you are on Monday." Another co-worker reacted similarly. Part of the reason we waited to start on a weekend was the reputation of sleep training. If we were going to knowingly subject ourselves to long,painful nights, it needed to be over the weekend.
That was the premise with which we started this weekend. We've been reading "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child 3rd edition by Dr. Marc Weisbluth" for the past couple of weeks thanks to a friend of ours having an extra copy. She refers to it as a sleep Bible because it's her go to resource for all things sleep related just like the Bible is the go to book for some people for all things related to just about anything.
Last weekend, we started by paying attention to his awake time. The idea here is that a baby should be awake for no more than 1-2 hours before going down for a nap. Overall, I would call last weekend a success. He went down for naps within the proper time frame. Mostly I nursed him or we otherwise soothed him to sleep. Like clockwork though, he was only sleeping for about 30 minutes with a couple of exceptions.
The week at daycare was just as bad and got worse. By the end of the week he was taking 20 minute naps. The important thing to note here, is that according to Weisbluth, anything less than a 45 minute minute nap (1 sleep cycle) isn't restful.
What ultimately led us to talk about sleep training was a combination of daycare patterns and Ethan's inability to go to sleep without some serious motherly soothing. His other mom is his primary daycare teacher and experiences first hand every day putting Ethan down for a nap in his crib and having him cry non-stop for 40 minutes before falling asleep for a piddly 30.
The bedtime routine has also been painful at times. The process of transferring a lightly sleeping baby into a crib after he has been nursed or rocked to sleep is an absolute art form. If he woke up while trying to put him down, it was back to square one. Waking up in the middle of the night was an issue too. It got to the point where I was picking him up still swaddled, nursed him, and put him back to bed. I didn't risk changing his wet-only diaper in the middle of the night either for fear of pissing him off so much that he wouldn't nurse back to sleep easily. I was I was getting increasingly frustrated (and tired) and bedtime was become a stressor rather than a time to cuddle with my sweet little boy.
Enter sleep training. There are so many different strategies and opinions on sleep training. Do you let your baby cry? Do you go in the check on him periodically while he's crying? Before this weekend, I would have said I was not an advocate of letting him cry but in hindsight I would say that perhaps I was also a bit naive.
I've seen first hand this weekend how Ethan's inability to fall asleep was only being perpetuated by our rushing in to give him back his binky or roll him off his tummy. I observed how quickly he would go from crying to practically asleep in our arms to crying again when we returned him to his crib. Relying on us to fall asleep and stay asleep was hurting his sleep.
Given his apparent sensitive nature, we opted to take the following approach:
1) Let him cry but console him at regular intervals if the crying continues. (5,7,10,15 minutes)
2) When we go in to console him, pick him up out of the crib, hold him until he's calm again, and then return him to his crib.
3) Before putting him into bed each time say the same thing (modified slightly for nap time versus night time sleeping)
4) If he wakes in the middle of the night or during a nap, wait 5-10 minutes before heading in to allow him the opportunity to fall back asleep.
5) If he rolls over or loses his binky, let him be until the next time we go in to console him. If we do end up going in, we will give him back his binky and return him to his back.
We've found the Weisbluth book very helpful and also a blog entry dedicated to sleep training. In the blog, I particularly have found the section on the different types of cries to be valuable (http://community.babycenter.com/post/a5417415/how_to_successfully_teach_a_baby_to_sleep_-_3rd_ed.)
After one weekend and one day of daycare, Ethan is already a changed boy. The longest he's cried intensely was 35 minutes and the longest he's taken to fall asleep has been about 50. Listening to him cry is not easy and I don't ever want to take it for granted but in our case letting him cry a bit is working and it has gotten a bit easier. The successes are already accumulating as well. He's fallen asleep without his binky on multiple occasions. He's fallen asleep without any crying on a couple occasions after middle of the night feedings. He's woken up from a nap and fallen right back to sleep. And.......drum roll please....... he took a 1 hr 20 minute nap at daycare today. Considering that at daycare on Friday he took one 15 minute nap and one 25 minute nap, you can perhaps understand why I couldn't stop smiling when I heard the good news today. He wasn't as grouchy during the day and he actually got some playtime at home before it was time for bed tonight.
I am truly amazed at what a difference a little self-restraint on our part has had on his ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. Considering that sleep training is just as much about training us as it is about training him, I'm grateful too that it seems to have been possible to teach his old dog moms some new tricks.
