When my son was born we lived in fear that he would be as terrible a sleeper as his big sister. But within only a month or two he was sleeping better than she ever had. The dread of a year or more without a decent night sleep disappeared from the rear view mirror of our lives. Then we were faced with weight gain and feeding issues and the good sleeping stopped. Now, at seven months, our son is finally maintaining a healthy weight, but his sleep habits are all over the map. So we finally decided to start sleep training him. With our daughter, we my husband wouldn’t even consider sleep training until she was eight or nine months old, because we were too tired to try and implement any kind of plan. In the middle of the night it always feels easier to do what you usually do, even if the end result isn’t what you want. With our daughter that meant feeding her every time she woke up, sometimes every two hours all night long. Usually I fell asleep feeding her, woke up hours later and as soon as I tried to put her in her crib, she would wake up. It was miserable.
When we finally broke down around 13 months we used a method where we wouldn’t pick her up or take her out of her crib, but whenever she woke crying one of us would sit with her. Similar to the Sleep Lady Method we moved further and further away until we were in the hallway. Now, starting over with our son, one of us sits by his crib and puts a hand between the bars. Usually he grabs on the hand, lays his head on it and is asleep again within minutes, if not seconds. I still finding myself having to feed him and change his diaper midway through the night. But he usually goes back to sleep easily and sleeps until between 5-7 AM. We’re already making some progress so maybe good night’s sleep is in our near future after all.
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