It's been a while, I know. I got wrapped up in all the craziness of the holidays and we're smack dab in the middle of doing some gentle sleep training with JC right now which has been taking up a lot of time. But as I am lying here on his bedroom floor waiting for my little one to wake up after only 35 min or so of napping (hence the need for the sleep training), I figure I might as well update the Internet on how things are going. First, I finished the curtains for JC's room! And I actually did it with a sewing machine and everything. I feel very proud of myself for that one. The throw blanket I was knitting? Sadly it seems it has gone the way of past craft projects. Maybe I'll pick it up again tonight after JC goes to bed? It's hard to knit and have a glass of wine though and these days I'm more inclined towards a nice cab to wind down my day!
I will say though that the night time sleep training is going great. Just after he turned 4 mths he started having trouble falling asleep and we had to start rocking him to sleep with a pacifier and then valiantly attempting to transfer him to his crib. Sometimes we were successful but often he would wake up and we'd have to start again. Then he would typically sleep 8-9 hours until 3 or 4am, but then wake up every hour or two from then on, despite being fed each time he woke up. However, now with the sleep training, he's falling asleep on his own at 6:30 pm, I'll give him a dream feed at 10:30 pm after which he falls right back to sleep until 6am. And it's been less than a week!
So how'd we do it? First, we hired a sleep doula, which has been totally worth the money. She set us up on a schedule where the first night we put JC down wide awake at 6:30pm and stayed in his room with him patting his belly,shushing, and singing a little song "It's okay, it's alright, you're going to sleep" whenever he was fussing (read screaming, crying, etc). That way he started to learn to self soothe but knew that we were with him at all times. We did this throughout the night whenever he fussed. He got a dream feed at 10:30, which was really hard to do at first bc the last thing you want to do after you finally get a baby to sleep is risk waking him up! But it went pretty well (and now he doesn't fuss at all!), and the rest of the night we did the shushing/song/patting but didn't do a feed until 6am. That was a long night, needless to say! The next few nights we did the same basic thing but stopped patting after night one, and stopped shushing after night two. By night four we started to delay going into the room for five minutes, ten minutes the next night, etc. Last night he soothed himself to sleep and only woke up at 8:30 bc he had rolled over into the side of the crib and got stuck. Once we repositioned him, he got himself right back to sleep and basically slept through to 6:15am! What a change!
Now we're doing the same thing with the naps but it's much harder bc I have to shush/sing/pat JC after he wakes up from his short nap to coax him to sleep longer, but he's having none of it at this point because he's no longer tired. We've only tried this for three naps so far, and it's been really tough! But I'll trust in the process and persevere! And I'll let you know how it works out!
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