We are sleep training LL with Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Though I’ve never read Ferber, I think of Weissbluth as being a kind of Ferber light: basically the same theory, maybe a bit more namby pamby waffling in the Weissbluth model. Both seem to feel that just letting the baby cry (Weissbluth calls it “extinction,” a word choice that I find alarming) until the baby shuts up and goes to sleep, is the best and quickest route, though Weissbluth allows for other options even if he doesn’t really recommend them.
Jeez, sleep training! What a bitch. But LL had gotten into a routine whereby she would successfully avoid sleeping nearly the whole day (minus a few fifteen-minute-long quick hitter naps), and then by about 5:00 pm she was so overtired and unreasonable that I’d have no choice but to put her down for the night several hours early. After a few night wakings, she would wake up for the day at 4:00 am and we would begin the whole nightmare over again — and this after her establishing expectations by sleeping in two six-to-seven hour stretches by 8 weeks old! Four month sleep regression — it’s not a myth.
Anyway, whereas Mini would scream his head off for a half hour, LL generally will only do it a few minutes. But, then she will wake up after only sleeping for a half hour or so, and start screaming, even while she is rubbing her eyes and clearly still tired. I fight going in there for as long as I can, hoping that she will go back to sleep. Usually this doesn’t last very long, and I crack and go in there, where I am greeted by LL’s exaggerated sigh of relief coupled with a single tear running her cheek (which Mr. Right-Click likened to the old commercial with the American Indian crying over the state of pollution.)
[Insert joke about girls being more dramatic than boys here.]
In short: I hate it. But she’s getting better with her naps, and I’m hoping to have her sleeping past 5 am any day now! [Yawn.]
Do you know why she keeps waking? My son used to wake himself because his arms would flail. I remember swaddling my daughter at that age so she looked like a Buddhist monk – one arm in, one arm out.
My experience of leaving children to cry is that if they haven’t gone to sleep or significantly reduced crying in 5 minutes then I go in and soothe. Oftentimes this is a pat on the back. Sometimes it has meant giving my daughter a cuddle and then putting her back in bed when she starts becoming drowsy. I found that easing the transition points often helped, particularly if she was grizzly due to teething or some other baby woe.
Now that my daughter is 18 months, and she wakes and cries but still seems tired we do the staggered retreat approach. First I pat her and go ‘shush shush shush’, then I just watch her next to her crib for a few minutes then I move a few paces back, stay there for a few minutes and finally move out of her sight. If she grizzles then I go ‘shush shush shush’ again. If she doesn’t grizzle I go away completely. She seems fine with that whereas if I left right away and closed the door she would scream the house down.
Anyway, that’s what worked for mine. You’ll know best what works for yours.
I think she woke up mostly because she was overtired, though her morning nap is just kind of short. Even on a good day it’s only like 45 minutes, so I guess we are stuck with that. She will take a longer one in the afternoon. We are transitioning out of the swaddle now because she has figured out how to get out of the miracle blanket (I have no idea how she does this), but still has the flailing arm issue. Fortunately she seems to be adjusting to the sleep sack OK, so I’m hoping she will be out of the flailing phase soon.
We are Weissbluth people too! However, fair warning here, some kids just never really nap. My oldest would fight it a lot, like waiting 1.5 hours of fuss so she would sleep 20 minutes and my youngest went down easy, but never slept more than 30-45 minutes until she switched to (occasional, but certainly not predictable) afternoon nap only. Not that you were asking for advice….but what worked for me was setting a “schedule” that whenever she woke up, she went down 2-2.5 hours later no matter what, earlier if she gave tiredness cues. My theory being that you stay until you sleep, even if you don’t reach the hour point Dr. W desires, get a big old happy greeting, then we eat and play, then we do it again until you collect enough hours to not be miserable. This sometimes meant 4 little naps a day, and yes you are a prisoner in your own home, but eventually she got the idea and if nothing else, we avoided the 5pm over-tired crash that results in 4am wake up calls. I also treat anything before 7am as “night waking” and tuck ‘em back in. No one is up before 7, I do not tolerate that shit, 12-14 hours of servitude a day is plenty.
Then again, kids do what they damn well please so who knows. Your mileage may vary. Regardless good luck, and I hope you all get some sleep soon.
You know, I’m pretty lucky: we started this on Sunday, which was a bad day that I had to spend at home the whole time going back and forth between her room and the living room. But! now she is doing much better. Her morning nap is still shortish but 1) she takes it, and 2) it is just barely (like one minute) over the 45 minute mark, so it’s got to be doing something. She does take a longer afternoon nap, so the main point of contention is now that elusive third nap, which she really needs but won’t always take. I was thrilled this morning when she got up at 6:30 after being down since 6pm last night, with only one feed in between. Fingers crossed that we are on the upside of it (for now).
We did Weissbluth as well. We started night time “graduated extinction” at 4 months. We did the go in after 5 minutes of crying (don’t pick up), then go in after 7 minutes, 10, 20, etc. I don’t think we ever had to go in more than 3 times. If he woke up, even after 15 minutes of sleep, we started the whole process over again. I was under the mistaken impression that he would start sleeping through the night after he was sleep-trained. This was, as I said, totally inaccurate.
Fast forward 26 months. J is a fantastic sleeper (please don’t let that jinx it!). I think the most important thing that comes out of the sleep training, at least in our case, is that he knows how to soothe himself to sleep. He often talks and sings for 30 minutes before falling asleep at bedtime, but he does that all on his own and we can go about our exciting adult business like doing the laundry and washing the dishes.
LL is absolutely beautiful!
I’m kind of doing the graduated extinction now, though it’s less scientific. What I am really trying to do is just plain old extinction — we did graduated with Mini and although it worked great, it took so damn long and I have a lot less patience now. But what ends up happening is that I’m too much of a wimp for the full on extinction most of the time, so I’ll go in at increasing intervals until she’s down. She’s actually very good at it — I think it was so tough initially because she had become so incredibly overtired that nothing would work until we broke her resistance down.
We were big on the routine when sleep training our first. We did the exact same thing every night at the same time. It worked really well for us, but I think that has a lot to do with our son’s personality and less the method.
In reference to your previous post, which I can’t seem to comment on. it does get easier with two. Mine are pretty far apart 5 and 18 months so its great because my son is such a great helper. He plays with her. Watches her while I do things like go to the bathroom, feed the dogs, etc. You’ll get into a routine with them both.
I also completely agree with the whole what is the point of all this. I’ve been feeling that about blogging for about a month now. I’m not sure what I’m trying to get out of it anymore. For the most part its understanding and comraderie. But when you don’t get that, what then?
I let my first two sweet babies run me ragged and by the third I read the Ferber book and used it loosely to help her learn to get herself to sleep. Babies 4, 5, 6 were truly sweet babies after making my own way after reading Baby Wise I adopted a Eat, Play, Sleep schedule. Happiest decision for the whole family ever. A reliable, stable schedule where we all knew what to expect. Kids who were much happier because they had enough sleep and a mom who was well rested taking care of them.
Good luck, work it out however it works for you.
All that goes out the window when they’re teens!