Oh my. It only took me about 10 months to do it, but Weston's been regularly sleeping through the night for well over a month now. I've read books, other's blogs, and all sort of things to figure out how to get him to stop waking up between 11pm and 2am to nurse.
Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child is a great book (but very poorly written--the guy needs an editor) to understand the physiological part of sleeping. It mentions that after 9 months, babies don't need to eat during the night. My problem? He was eating every time I offered, so I figured he was hungry. And he's not a fat baby by any means, so the mother in me kept going in to feed him because on some level I was afraid he would waste away.
Here's how the habit forms...He nurses when I offer, so then he wakes up the next night because he knows that last night he got to eat when he woke up. And Mom won't refuse.
Weston: 1. Mom: 0
But, then I started to get the feeling that he wasn't really that hungry. He would nurse just a little bit to fall back asleep. Besides, he had slept through the night before on a handful of occasions. That's when it sunk in that
I had created this habit.
He was expecting me to be there to feed him when he woke up. There were many times when we tried to let him cry it out, but after 45 minutes of listening to a hysterical baby at 2 am, I couldn't do it. And then when I saw a broken blood vessel in his eye one morning afterward, I felt horrible. I know, the cry-it-out method says to let them be, but I
really couldn't do it. We let him cry himself to sleep for nap, but that lasts all of 10 minutes.
The night we moved into our new house, this was my plan: when he cried, I let him do so for 5 minutes. Then, I went into his room and
instead of picking him up to comfort him, I sat down on the floor and put my head next to the mattress and calmly told him, "You can do it. You can calm down." He stood at the crib railings, wailing out of frustration, but after about 3 minutes, he actually sat down and put his head on my hand and continued to cry. I kept talking to him quietly and then he gradually toppled over and laid down, still crying, but not entirely unwilling to give this whole new thing a shot. Rubbing his back and telling him that I believed he could do it, I stayed in there until he fell asleep.
The next two nights were the same thing. Then it started to get a little harder. He wouldn't calm down as quickly and if he laid down, he would get up again and wail at the railings. I had to keep believing in him and the fact that he could indeed do this (thank you to
Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman), and I would tell him that in a calm voice while trying to squeeze my arms through the crib railings as I would pat his back.
I'd say it was about a solid week of going into his room and "talking him down." He had several nights of uninterrupted sleep, and then one or two more relapses, but since then, he's been sleeping from about 6:30 pm to 6 am!! He still takes a morning nap and afternoon nap, too.
Now I need to figure out how to get me to sleep through the night... Old habits die hard.
