Sleeping

It's been a week since we gave up on the gentle no cry sleep solutions from Elizabeth Pantley's book. the no cry sleep solution.

I guess I could start at the beginning. She used to go to sleep on her own. She didn't even really cry when we put her to bed. But then over Thanksgiving I nursed her to sleep a couple of times 'cause the schedule was so crazy and we just wanted her asleep. Whoops.

The all of a sudden she needed to be nursed to sleep every night and every time she woke up during the night. That was annoying, 'cause she would wake up after a half hour like clockwork and putting her to sleep the second time would take a very long time. So we knew something needed to change.
Then she got sick and it was Christmas so we just kept going with nursing her to sleep rather than traumatizing her while she's off schedule. I read the book and we started trying some of the stuff in it after new years.

The book says it can take a long time to see improvements. We only gave it two weeks though. I would have been willing to go longer but she got worse about sleeping, a lot worse, rather than better. In addition to waking up after a half hour she kept waking up frequently until midnight or later and then she added overnight wakings as well. Like 2 am, 4 am, 6 am. So that wasn't working for me anymore.

Last week we decided she was miserable and making us miserable too so we changed her bedtime routine and put her to bed awake. She cried for about 10 minutes and then fell asleep. That first night she woke up at 10:30 but went back to sleep within 10 minutes. She had one night where we had to go up a couple times but she is usually asleep within that 10 minutes.

We were afraid it was going to take 2 hours of crying for her to fall asleep. Thankfully it doesn't. For ferberizing you're supposed to go in and check on them after 2 minutes and 4 minutes etc. increasing the time between visits until they fall asleep. From experience we know that if you go in there she gets angry and even more angry if you don't pick her up. So we just decided to go cold turkey. I think we ended up pretty lucky.

So, we have our evenings back. And she's getting a lot more sleep. her naps have even started to improve. Overall I think she's crying less than when she was being nursed to sleep and waking up constantly.

Win!