Sleep "Training"

As we previously alluded to, we began sleep training while I was away on my business trip in mid-December. We planned to put Chase to sleep, have Stephen respond to him when he cried, go back after 10 minutes to comfort him (gradually increasing the interval between responding), and for me to not nurse him until at least 5am. Not crying it out too much and hopefully the worst of it would be over while I was away. So how did it go?

The first night I was gone, Chase was up (but not really crying) for 1.5 hours. The second night, he was only up 20 minutes. The night I got back, he was barely up 20 minutes in the middle of the night. I was impressed.

The next night he cried for 1 1/2 hours before I finally went in and nursed him. The same thing happened the next night. On the third night, I was hysterical crying and went in after 50 minutes. There was no way I was doing this if our little guy was going to cry like that for so long.

Our first mistake was not reading any books on the subject. After some online research, I discovered that in order for this to be effective, the baby has to be put to bed awake and learn to fall asleep on their own. We had continued to let Chase fall asleep while having his nightly bottle. Mistake #2. So we decided to put the bottle at the beginning of the bedtime routine and (following the advice of a moms website) did the routine when he was tired the first night. Bottle, bath, book, song, and bed. He fell asleep pretty easily and didn't wake up until 4. I nursed him and he went back to bed. This could work. But unfortunately, Stephen unexpectedly had to go out of town the next night so I nursed Chase when he woke up (no idea what time it was) in the middle of the night.

And then the traveling began (Mistake #3: Starting sleep training before lots of holiday travel). Chase had to fall asleep in the car a couple of nights. He was in new places and we kept trying to put him to bed awake, but at all different times at night, with and without his bedtime routine, and when he was or wasn't tired. Needless to say, he was not happy and it got to the point that he was crying any time he went near a crib.

So, what did we do?


We gave up.

We went back to giving him a bottle before bed outside of his routine (when we needed to) and nursing on demand during the night. We stopped letting him cry so he'd get over his dislike of cribs. Those nights he only woke up around 2am and 5:30am, nursed, and went back to sleep. We were both around so I was able to sleep in while Stephen played with him in the morning. New Years Eve/Day was kind of a disaster because he never really got settled after we got home at 2am (upcoming blog post), but that was our fault.

Now that we're home and back to a normal schedule, we're trying again...but with a kinder, gentler approach. We're doing his nightly routine and trying to get him to go to bed awake and fall asleep on his own. But if he hasn't eaten much or seems hungry, we'll give him a bottle right before bed. During the night Stephen's going to respond to him first and see if he can get him to settle back to sleep, but if he's too upset, then I'll just go in. Yes, we want him to sleep 11 hours straight, but I can handle just getting up with him once a night. He'll eventually learn to fall asleep, and go back to sleep, on his own. In the meantime, I don't want our baby to be so sad!

We'll let you know how this works...