So it is no big secret that Evie has not been much of a sleeper.  Can you imagine going 14 months straight without ever sleeping through the night?  Me neither, despite just going through that.  You know, it is what it is, but I do feel a little annoyed when I hear other parents complaining that their child didn’t sleep through the night until 5 months, etc.  And I’m not talking 1 time either, I think she averaged waking up about 4 times a night right up until a month ago.  Even that was something of an improvement though…back around 3 or 4 months, she was waking up every 40 minutes like clockwork.

So Evie’s sleep troubles are not something that I discuss very much with people.  I’ve discovered that in some cases talking about parenting is like talking about politics.  People can have really strong opinions about things and talking about them will not only not convince them to change their mind, but it may cost you a friendship.  Much like with politics I find it very interesting but just easier to not talk about, especially because like with politics I think my opinions on the matter do not strictly follow the majority.  However, after having the success of the last month or so, I want to put this out there to potentially help anybody else who is in the same boat as we were.

So I guess let me start by saying that being a parent is very hard.  You get so much advice from everywhere and it is especially difficult to follow your instincts when it contradicts that advice.  One thing that I’ve learned from books and articles is that much of the “common knowledge” about parenting is folk lore and old wives tales and is usually outright wrong or at the very least not the best way of doing things.  This is especially true of a lot of the info that is passed down from generation to generation and much of that knowledge actually doesn’t go back as far as you think it does.  Also, when compared with most of the world, the U.S. in particular has some very odd ways of doing things when it comes to babies.  But no matter how much you might research a topic and form opinions, you are really sailing on uncharted waters and it is impossible not to second guess yourself.  And this is a person’s life you’re talking about, so it is not really conducive to trial and error.  There are no do-overs.

So our story starts with two main controversial issues; co-sleeping and the “crying it out” method of teaching.  For the first part, Evie started the night in her own bed.  The first time she woke up after we went to bed, she was brought into our bed with us.  Some people are horrified by this for some reason, but I’m not sure why.  Certainly it started as a convinience thing because it was easier to feed her all the times she woke up at night.  But eventually it started to be a strain on both us and her and we suspected that we were keeping her awake as much as she was keeping us awake.

Now everybody’s advice immediately was that Evie would never learn to be independent or sleep by herself unless we allowed her to “cry it out” for a couple hours.  I think every parent’s gut instinct tells them that is the wrong thing to do, but I can certainly understand them falling to the peer pressure.  We didn’t receive too many comments, but we received enough to “know” that we were more or less pampering and babying our child by “rushing in right away to pick her up.”  We started receiving warnings to let her cry it out as early as 2 months old which, in retrospect, was rediculous.  She clearly didn’t have the mental capability to learn any lessons at that age.

The crying it out method doesn’t make sense to me for a couple of reasons.  First, it seems wholly unlikely that, as a species, this is the only way to develop healthy sleeping habits.  I just can’t imagine cave men sitting around going, “Let Ug cry out.  It only way she learn.  Hope no sabertooth tiger hear her.”  It seems like a wholly unnatural thing and if every parent’s gut instinct is that it is wrong (instincts honed over millions of years) , then it probably is.  Second, how can it be that there is only one correct path when it comes to teaching your child to sleep?  Any skill has probably billions of ways it can be learned, except this one?  This one has to be learned this specific way.  All other skills a baby learns by watching you except this one in which she needs to be tortured and punished.  And what lesson are you trying to teach your child anyway?  That they can’t trust you because you won’t come when they call?  I’m not saying it is not an effective way to teach.  It obviously works for, well, everybody.  But if a kinder and gentler way could be found, then I am willing to put in a little extra work to ensure that my daughter could learn sleeping skills in such a way that didn’t involve her passing out from terror and / or anger.  I think that’s fair.

Okay, so at this point we know that we need to do something about her sleeping and we have decided not to let her cry it out despite everyone (EVERYONE) insisting this was the only way to go.  After a couple of false starts, this is the method we used.  And it was surprisingly effective!  After 14 months to have her sleeping 9 hours straight within two weeks seemed like a miracle.  Some of these steps sort of blend together because in some cases they all sort of need to happen at once.

1) Feeding her before her bath

Originally I would give Evie her bath and then hand her off to Sara who would nurse her to sleep.  So the first step was to have Sara feed her before I gave Evie a bath.  In fact, it works best if Evie doesn’t see Sara at all from bath time until the next morning if you want to avoid a sob-fest.

2) Getting her to fall asleep in her crib

Previously we always put Evie to sleep by rocking her in the chair and singing and patting her back.  Of course we periodically made declarations like, “From now on don’t pick her up when she wakes up! Just pat her on the back or something!” but it never worked.  Eventually we would pick her up because she would just be crying so hard.  Also, we sometimes tried to put her in her crib so she could get “acclimated” to being in there, but it didn’t seem to make a difference.  So imagine my surprise when one night I randomly tried putting her in the crib and reading to her and she just fell asleep!  So I guess the moral of the story is just try something and see if it works!  Now sometimes at first it took her a lot longer to fall asleep this way, so I decided I needed a really big book because I could read about 30 of her really short books in that amount of time.  We have this collection of Winnie the Pooh stories, so I started reading those.  This ended up working so well that now she begs for “Pooh!” even when she is pretending to go “night night” with her teddy bear.  We’ve restarted the book a 2nd time and I have had to make up many Pooh stories when we have been traveling and didn’t have the book with us.

3) Night weaning

Okay, so far so good, we have her falling asleep in her crib.  But she’s still waking up about 4 times a night (which may actually be an improvement believe it or not).  The next step was removing her midnight snacks.  Like I said it is easier if she doesn’t see Sara at all because it is too tempting.  I think she was waking up naturally and then thinking, “Hey, I’m awake, I might as well get something to eat…” and that was causing her to wake up all the way.  So, we had to make her know eating at night was off limits.

4) Not picking her up

Now we were well on our way; time for the final push.  Now we had to somehow keep from picking her up.  For this part I just had to bite the bullet.  I would put her to bed and when she woke up the first time (usually around midnight) I would go in to her room and sleep the rest of the night on the floor.  Then, whenever she woke up (and the first few nights, this was a LOT) I would be right there to sing her to sleep before she was too awake.  There were a few times when I had to pick her up because she was crying too hard, but I was actually really surprised at how quickly this started working!  I thought there was no way she’d go back to sleep without picking her up, but I guess the combination of knowing she wasn’t going to eat or see Sara and being used to falling asleep in her crib without being held was enough.  One thing I learned was to steel my nerves.  Often just when I thought, “Okay, I just have to pick her up” she would stop crying and fall asleep 2 seconds later.

Now I know what you’re saying.  “Isn’t that the same as letting her cry it out?”  I guess to some degree it is.  It was certainly heartbreaking to listen to her sob, “mommy mommy mommy” and Sara not being able to come to her.  I’m not saying it wasn’t hard and that there wasn’t some crying, but when she was crying I was there with her to comfort her and to get through a rough and scary time together with her, not abandoning her to do it alone.  It was certainly different than the classic idea of parents wringing their hands outside of the door as their child cries for hours at a time.

I guess at the end of the day, it’s kind of like a diet.  There may be many fancy names and techniques to use, but underneath they all agree on a couple of very simple principles.  There will be crying.  But I don’t think you have to be callous and harden your heart to your baby (at least not all the way).  This worked for us and if I had it to do all over again, I don’t think I would do it any other way (other than maybe trying this sooner!)  Well, actually, one thing that I would change would be to sleep on an air mattress.  Sara kept offering, but I thought it would be in the way and I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take, so I kept saying, “Surely it will only be for a few more nights, it isn’t worth the hassle!”  But, in retrospect, I had some pretty sore nights!

So after 2 short weeks we had a baby sleeping through the night in her crib.  She gets up very early (~5 a.m.) but compared to not getting an unbroken night of sleep for over a year, I am not complaining!  We had some vacation right after this and we were worried it would mess things up, but it doesn’t seem to have set us back at all.