today Leo slept until 8am. from 7pm. i feel like Christmas came to our house early, and i couldn’t be happier. (as a bonus, Christmas weather is New York is 70F/21C this year. now you get the whole picture, right?)
ok, ok, it was not all just a fairy-tale with uninterrupted 13 hours of sleep. nor for me, neither for Leo, but still – it was the record. and this i how we got here.
sleep training part 1 we went through when Leo was just 5 months old (you can read about it here). though very ambivalent about the notorious “cry it out method”, i gave it a try back then and modified it according to my gut feelings and rushing hormones. it worked! by 7 months of age Leo was falling asleep at 7pm every night, and with some little whining here and there he was sleeping all through the night, until 5am. “not bad!” would say many. but alas not me who used to sleep until 10am all her life. considering that i could never put myself to bed before 10-11pm, and then waking up at 5am was giving me only 6 hours of rest. and no matter what smiles Leo was happy to share with me in the darkness and loneliness of his 5am call time, i just couldn’t help but feel sleep-deprived, exhausted, and depressed. my husband and i talked about extending the CIO method for the hours after 5am, but i didn’t feel it was right – i knew that at 5am Leo was fully awake, hungry for breast milk and playtime. it would be too cruel to let him cry only because we wanted to sleep longer. so i started going to bed earlier (quite often, way before my husband was coming home after work) and waking up at 5am with Leo, pretending that it’s ok to start the day like this. at 7am my husband was changing the shift and letting me sleep for another 2 hours. it didn’t make any of us much happier nor better rested – i was still tired and cranky, and so was my husband, plus we started falling apart as a couple because we could barely spend time together. impossible, we thought, there should be a solution to this.
at the same time a friend of mine with a 5mo daughter contacted me asking for advice about sleep training. after 5 months of no sleep she and her husband decided to give it a try. “we hit the rock bottom”, she said. and i felt like i could relate, even though the situation was different. she was also ambivalent about CIO method but she said smh like “I just need to believe”, so i shared only the positive outcome of the sleep training and kept my own struggle with 5am call times to myself. we kept in touch all through the three nights when they applied this method to their daughter, and by the 2nd night i heard something i heard several times before from other people who went through it: “we couldn’t believe it, she fell asleep all by herself at 7pm and woke up at 7am!”. i felt so happy and proud for her (i know how difficult it is for a mother to survive through the very first night) but i also couldn’t help but wonder – may be i didn’t push it far enough with Leo, and simply gave in too easily and too early for unnecessary 5am wakings?
i did more research. some people were recommending Ferber method for dealing with early birds babies. that is, more soft and gradual approach than straight forward CIO. the goal is to teach a baby that his wake up time is early, and he needs to soothe himself to sleep a little longer. to achieve that you go into his room when he wakes up, and quietly pat him back to sleep, spending just a little time with him to reassure that you are around, but without picking him up or feeding. then you leave the room (and, most probably, leave him crying) for short period of time. you set your timer and let’s say in 10 min you come back to his room and do the same thing – pat him to sleep, kiss his forehead, tell him “night, night” or whatever appropriate you find to say. according to Ferber, you need to continue doing it until desired wake up time, with strict time intervals between your walk-ins. the next night you can extend intervals slightly, and keep on doing so for the following nights until you reach your goal. now, Dr. Ferber doesn’t guarantee that you will. all babies are different and what might work for some, wouldn’t work at all for others. but the method sounded reasonable to me, and we decided to try.
so this is how it was for us. at 6:30pm we finished our bed routine, i kissed Leo good-night while he was still awake in his crib and closed the door behind me. in about 3 minutes he was deep asleep. he didn’t wake up all night, as usual. but as usual at 5am i started hearing him rollin over in his crib and making noises, calling for me. i waited for 10-15 minutes until he insisted with a cry. as always, he was so happy and excited to see me, and i didn’t have the heart of not picking him up from the crib – i simply didn’t feel it would be right. he was also looking for my breast so insistently that i gave in to our usual morning ritual and put him on his side next to me for nursing. after half an hour of cuddles in the dark quiet room, i changed his diaper without turning on the light, and patted him the way i do before putting him to sleep for the night. he was “singing” his morning songs, loud but melancholic, and it just felt like a perfect lullaby. with faint heart, fearing what might follow, i kissed his forehead and said “good night, my love”, and put him in his crib. he started crying immediatedly, but i repeated my firm good night and closed the door behind myself intentionally loud. instead of going back to our master bedroom i decided to stay on the couch and was prepared for a battle with myself. my timer was clocked for 10min, and i couldn’t stop watching the screen, with numbers going down so slowly as i was listening to his sweet little voice crying in the darkness for me. it literally breaks your heart to hear them cry. i felt like every cell of my body was so in tune with his, i could cry myself. and so i quietly did, but i was holding to the timer and thinking – ok, just 10minutes, if it doesn’t work, i will quit it, after all 5am it’s not so bad and probably it won’t last forever, we will get by somehow, don’t know how, but we will… the timer was still showing 3minutes left when Leo’s crying subsided to silence. i waited another 5 minutes to go check on him in his room. he was curled into his favorite right side embryo position and fast asleep. i tiptoed to our bed and spooned my hubby, still wide awake and worried, listing to every tiny sound of the night. but it was just quiet and dark outside. and i think i finally dozed off. i had nightmares about being back in school but in United States instead of Russia, and kids making fun of me because i couldn’t speak proper English. in the classroom there was a big clock on the wall above the blackboard, and i kept on checking the time, waiting for my parents to come and pick me up and take me home. i woke up with a jump, and startled at the big clock in our bedroom. it was showing 15 minutes to 8am. my husband asked me “where is Leo? is he watching cartoons?” and i think my heart skipped a beat or two. i went to his room and saw him sleeping peacefully. i decided to wait until 8am and then wake him up with kisses. at 7:55am he woke up and cried out softly, as he always do in the morning. and then he smiled, and it felt like it was a sunny Christmas morning.
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