It Takes 6 Nights Apparently

Night 6 was the winner guys, Night 6!

When my pediatrician recommended we CIO (yes, literally every professional I spoke to recommended CIO, even the crunchy granola attachment parenting SF hippies who at 8 weeks told me I just had to grin and bear it recommended CIO at this point...that's how bad our situation was) she made it seem really simple.  Like there will be crying on Night 1, crying on Night 2 and by Night 3 you'll be all sorted out.

The sleep lady didn't make it sound THAT simple, but she also implied that it would be fairly quick and easy.

This is not quite how it has worked out for us and if you're thinking about CIO please know that it will probably take longer than 3 nights!

Night 5 particularly was ROUGH.  There was several episodes of crying in the middle of the night in which baby was awake for an hour.  This is when you hang your head in shame and think OH GOD IT'S NOT WORKING!

But here we are on Night 6 of Operation Get My Baby to Sleep By Letting Him Scream 2013 and finally FINALLY we had a really good night last night.

The GREATEST IMPROVEMENT is that we're able to get him down for the night in his crib and he'll sleep for 3 hours without a peep.  This takes a bit of crying still but with less and less every night.  He started out with 40 minutes of crying on Night 1 was down to 15 minutes by Night 4 and last night he only cried for 8 minutes and was OUT.

This means that I can actually DO things in the evening, I don't have to rush around in the half an hour he'd sleep in his crib and then go to bed with my baby at 9:30pm anymore!

Hip Hip Horray!

The next best thing is that last night he was also able to put himself back to sleep WITHOUT US for his middle of the night wakings.  He woke twice outside of feed windows and we just watched him on the monitor to see if he was going to get himself all riled up and need some comfort or settle himself...within just a few minutes he was BACK TO SLEEP.

Relief guys, RELIEF.

We did one feed at 12:30am, ONE FEED, this from the baby who used to nurse all night long.  He goes 6 HOURS between feeds at night now...and my boobs have adjusted accordingly.

When he woke at 5:30am we decided that since he did such a good job and he'd skipped his 2nd feed window and there had been basically no crying all night that we'd just bring him into bed with us for morning nursing and snuggles rather than attempt interval comforting even though this was a bit earlier than what I'd prefer to bring him to bed.

He went back to sleep easily with us and up for the day at 8:20am.  This is the one area of sleeping that I feel we really lucked out...we have a late riser.  There have only been a handful of times HIS WHOLE LIFE that he's been up before 7am and his norm is between 7:30-8:30am.  I feared putting him to bed so much earlier with the sleep training would force him awake early but that hasn't been the case!

So...sleep training is working!

Now the next step is US sleeping more as when baby wakes up...even if it's only for 5 minutes...we wake up as well (we're hyper aware of sounds from the monitor right now with this being so new to us) so we're still only getting about 3 hour stretches.

Unfortunately Dom is off today and will be gone for 2 nights, that means I have to do THE WHOLE NIGHT BY MYSELF!

EEK!

If we have more nights like last night that will be no problem but I can't bring myself to believe he'll be so accommodating so I'm gearing up for a rough night.

AND this will be my first time in 6 months sleeping in a bed ALL BY MYSELF!  No husband, no baby...just me...I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep! 

Wish us luck that last night continues to be the norm so that we can move on to Nap Training.

And some proof that my little drool monster bears us no ill will...