Our cute little fellow has sporadic sleeping habits at night. Some nights he will wake up 2 times but sometimes as many as 4 times. Needless to say…it’s getting old. At our 4 month appointment our pedi advised us to read the Ferber book and to let him go to sleep on his own without parental intervention (rocking, bouncing, etc). I have been dragging my feet on this because I didn’t want to hear my little one cry. I have read MANY books and all of them have different opinions on sleep. The one idea that makes the most sense to me is the “graduated extinction method.” This is Ferber’s method and is also one of the methods in “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.” This method is the idea that you put you baby to bed awake and check on them in different time intervals if they are crying. The time intervals get longer each time and each night. The purpose of this is so that they learn how to fall asleep on their own so when they wake up at night (we all do we just don’t realize it) they are able to go back to sleep without mom or dad rocking them. Last night it took B 40 minutes to put himself to sleep. He didn’t cry this whole time, which was much better than I expected. He would fuss for about 15-30 seconds then soothe himself for a minute and repeat this for a while. He also only woke up once at 3:15am and I fed him which I knew I was going to do. One wake up a night is perfectly fine with me at this point, and if he’s hungry of course he can eat.
Oh! Dave just came in…tonight it only took him 20 minutes to fall asleep! I’m hoping to see improvement each night and where he can get to the point of not fussing and just going to sleep.
I’m hoping the one wake up last night wasn’t a fluke and that tonight we will have the same luck. I think it will be much harder to let him cry when it’s later at night. I know that in the end this is all good for him it’s just hard. I also know he is safe, fed, clean, and warm he has just learned that mommy’s arms are where he falls asleep not his crib.
and I'll leave you with a picture : )
This was taken this morning after our first night of sleep training
Good luck! Praying it works quickly and he is sleeping through the night in no time:)
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