Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Sleep Training

The concept of sleep training was pretty foreign to me until a few days ago. Jackson woke up 1-2 times a night until he was a year old. Ava started out a much better sleeper than Jackson. For the first few months she only woke up once per night. We were pretty happy with this until November, when she started getting up every 2-3 hours. It seemed like she had to have a bottle to go back to sleep every time. I'm pumping for her, so every bottle she gets is breastmilk. At first I thought she might be going through a growth spurt, but after a few months I knew it was just habit.

I got on Facebook this weekend and decided to ask for some other opinions of what to do to get her sleeping better. Most suggested letting her cry some during the night to see if she would put herself back to sleep. I'm a fan of a few breastfeeding pages on Facebook and they are very outspoken on their opposition of CIO (Cry it Out). To be honest I wasn't a fan of the typical, let them cry until they pass out from exhaustion, view of it either. 

Bottom line, I didn't think she was trying to manipulate us but I know that her body had gotten into a habit of waking up and needing the comfort of a bottle to go back to sleep. I was getting pretty exhausted and something had to be done.

Sunday night we gave her a bottle and put her to bed around 8pm. At 11:30 she woke up. We decided to let her cry a little bit at first. I went in a few times to make sure she had her pacifier or to roll her over. She had a few episodes of all out fit throwing, but then it was really just a lot of whining. Letting her cry wasn't near as bad as I expected it to be. She went back to sleep at 12:30 and slept until 3. Since it had been 7 hours since she at last I went ahead and gave her a bottle. She went back to sleep until 6 when we gave her another bottle.

Monday night she went to bed at 8, woke up slightly to have a bottle at 9 and then Jordan fed her one more time at 10:30. She woke up briefly at 3 and fussed herself back to sleep. She slept until 6am when I fed her and then went back down until 9. 

Last night she went to bed at 8, I fed her at 10:30 and she didn't wake up until 7:30 to eat. I had to go put her pacifier back in her mouth sometime in the night, but she never really woke up or cried.

Overall I'm so happy with the results. Today is the first day I haven't felt like taking a nap in a long time. 

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone gave me on Facebook! I'll give you an update soon to let you know how it's going.

1 comment:

  1. I'm glad it's going so well. Hopefully Ava keeps up the trend. I had to sleep train both my kids and it was so completely worth it but it was really hard. Yay for feeling like you don't need a nap. That's a huge step!

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