if you have CIO, thought of CIO, done Ferber, OR non-CIO please come in
Thinking Ferber might be the way to go? Please, please tell me why NOT to.... I don't want to but here are the issues -
We have been co-sleepers/BF/ urse to sleep from the start just b/c it felt right. Now? Not so sure... the last month or so we started a floor bed- its been working ok- I still (or DH) sleep with her most of the time.
BUT... the last week has been so hard. She fights- and I mean FIGHTS to lay down. She would rather get up and play. I have to lay her down- she gets up- I lay her down- she SCREAMS- gets up, and we do it over and over again.Sometime for 1 hour!!! Its crazy. She's exhausted and so am I.
I am thinking to star Ferber or something else.... but she has never slept in her crib. ever. it would be major- like pulling a band aid off quick and painful (like our pedi said...uh huh... that's another topic!)
ETA:okay- so I just learned that LO is FINALLY cutting teeth, so that explains a lot. DH felt some on the btm, so there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Re: if you have CIO, thought of CIO, done Ferber, OR non-CIO please come in
I can't remember how old your LO is... but Emmy is going through crazy sleep hell right now, too. If you look back at my posts over the last week or two, you can see! It's nuts. We have done some sleep training. Not CIO (because we never leave her- her crib is in our room about 10 inches from the bed!), but some crying has been involved. We were really stuck, because not only had she never slept in a crib, she'd ALWAYS been swaddled- yes, even at 8.5 months.
We started off picking her up and walking with her, then putting her down and shhhhing and singing, patting back, etc. That just prolonged the process, so now we put her down (asleep- I still nurse her to sleep) and rub her tummy if she wakes up. I do think it's finally getting better. We were interrupted by an ear infection, but now that she's been on antibiotics she's on the upswing again.
I do think it's been a "quick and painful" transition, but it's been painful for all of us. I'm not comfortable leaving her alone to cry and I'm not comfortable moving her crib to her room yet. So, this is what we felt okay with now.
THIS is a link to the blog post where I go through the entire process we took. There are other posts that talk about my struggle with LJ and sleep, including one where I say I just can't do CIO. Which I eventually ended up doing for the most part.
I'd say it depends A LOT on WHY your baby isn't sleeping. For me, I had exhausted every other option and knew I was dealing with a habit and not a need.
We were co-sleep, BF, nurse to sleep from day one and went through exactly that around 11 mos and came out the other side without CIO, although we though of it, and there were tears involved in what we did.
DD would stand up in bed and start running around, she even managed to break my nose (but that's a different story...). I think it had to do with the longer daylight hours as it was around this time of year, or maybe our new king sized bed. I tried physically holding her down, but she hated that and would scream, so we changed our routine a bit and got DH involved in the final steps.
We changed our bedtime routine so that instead of getting out of the tub and running around naked for a while before books and bed she ran around before bath and went right into jammies and nursing after the tub. This was when she was the calmest and it was easier to nurse her down. She would only fall asleep that way maybe once a week so we went on to step 2...
I would nurse her lying in bed and if she got up and started playing around I would leave and DH would go in and lay with her. This upset her a bit because she wanted to come and go from the mummy milk, so after a few nights of this she knew that if she didn't settle down I would go, taking my milk with me, and I wasn't coming back. There was screaming involved in this, but she had her daddy right there with her, so I wouldn't consider that CIO. After a while when she was finished nursing I would ask her if it was time for "daddy turn" when she got fidgety, and she would either calm down and nurse some more or say yeah and I'd switch off with DH. DD started asking for DH when she was ready to go to sleep so we continued switching off and it gave me a bit of a break at the end of the day. It also set the stage for DH to do bedtimes all by himself
In my experience, if the sleep problem is teeth, you just have to wait it out -- sleep training (crying or no-cry methods) won't help when it's teeth. But once that passes, I would probably try to start getting her used to her crib (only if you eventually want her in her crib, of course). What we did was start a bedtime routine and have her start the night in her crib, then when she woke she'd sleep the rest of the night with us (nursing her back to sleep). At first, we'd have to rock her until she was completely sound asleep before we could lay her down, but slowly, very slowly, that got a little better.
Eventually, when she was about 13 or 14 months, we were ready to sleep train and we were comfortable with some crying. So here's what finally did work (C&Ped from an older post): We'd rock for about 5 minutes, lay her down, leave the room. Wait about a minute. Go back, soothe (generally this took about 10 seconds -- she was fine as soon as we picked her up), rock for 5 minutes, leave. Wait maybe 2 minutes. Repeat, increasing the wait time until you hit a length that you know is your limit.
This worked for me because the cry time was short, because she was comforted and held and cuddled in between, and because she calmed as soon as she saw us -- that made me see that nothing was really wrong, but she just needed another round of comforting. It worked surprisingly quickly, but she also had already shown (on several nights in a row) that she could sleep through.We had the same issue. We were cosleeping and nursing to sleep and at 11 months old, my daughter was waking at night nearly as much as she was at 1 month old. I couldn't take it anymore.
We did sleep training and transitioned her to a crib. Floor sleeping wasn't an option for us because if a parent is in the room, she won't sleep. Having a bedtime routine was essential to us. She had a sleep association with nursing. Now she has a sleep association with the routine instead and anyone can put her to sleep this way.
Honestly, I know people on this board are anti-CIO. And it was hard. But it was one of the best choiced I could have made. And my daughter does not have any attachment issues.
Our LO is cutting a tooth also and the other night he fussed and cried for an hour and wouldn't go down (I kept checking on him, etc) I finally got him up and let him play for an hour and tried again. He went down no problem. For whatever reason he wasn't ready to go to bed so I just don't force him on those nights. The next night he went down at his normal bed time.
I am with you on the end of your rope though....LO goes to bed easily but wakes every 2 hours all night long and he is almost 7 months old! I haven't slept much since he was born, honestly.
I told DH that when DS is 16 I'm going into his room at 7 am every Saturday morning to regale him with stories about how I didn't sleep for a year when he was born, LOL.
I've used Ferber's scheduling & night weaning techniques to help cut back on night nursing & some middle of the night wakeful times & fighting going down with great success. These techniques are not the gradual extinction method that most ppl associate with Ferber though, they address other problems besides "sleep associations". No crying was involved. Ferber has a ton of helpful sleep info in his book that has nothing to do with CIO.
Before you tackle any sleep problem (& we've had our fair share here - everything from medical issues to normal developmental stuff), find the root of the problem. Is it the schedule, like you're trying to put her down to early? Is it medical - teething, reflux, whatever? Is it truly an association issue, as in "DD can't fall asleep without rocking/nursing/whatever?" And is that association really a problem? Like Ari needs parental presence to fall asleep initially but its not a problem b/c he can self soothe later.
If she's only been fighting this bad the last week, it's prob the teething. Wait till that passes to do anything, else you'll be fighting an uphill battle. I've noticed sometimes Ari will fight sleep for a few days or a week when he's really hitting milestones too. I nurse him down @ night after a routine & he's usually asleep in 15 mins or less. If he's fighting, I know something is up, & it will pass.
There's a lot you can do besides gradual extinction - some may involve some fussing and/or crying, but crying with parental presence may be easier for a LO used to cosleeping. You have to do what works best for your LO & your family. Decide what things are actually problems, why they are happening, & then you can solve them.
Each time my kids have had a rough sleep patch (3 days -2 weeks long) it can be explained in hindsight by a developmental spurt, teething or an ear infection. I was feeling just like you describe right around 10 months and then again right after DS's birthday. Around 10 months, he was getting all four top teeth at the same time. At 12 months, he had a double ear infection. His sleep improved on its own and in the last week he's slept the whole night in his crib a few times.
Around ten months, I started putting him down to sleep in his crib at bedtime. This afforded me a few hours in the evening to get stuff done or have some me time. Then gradually he started sleeping longer, so I would get a few hours of sleep by myself, too. When he wakes, DH gets him and tries to settle him in our bed. If he can't settle him in a few minutes I nurse him.
We still put him down in his crib at bedtime 99-100% asleep. And most nights I nurse him down. Despite that, he can sleep all night and lately when he does wake it isn't until after 4am, so we get a nice long stretch of sleep either way.
We've never done any sleep training. Not for every family, but it has worked for us.
Hope that helps and good luck!
We tried everything else first and finally we decided to try CIO. I didn't have the choice of waiting it out since I work at a children's hospital and I felt dangerously groggy every day, which scared the heck out of me.
We did a modified Ferber method, where we started at very very short intervals, 1 min, 2 min vs the 5, 10, 15 min up to 20 minutes max. We allowed ourselves to speak quietly to DS when we did go in. Teething never really bothered him at night, but if he woke up due to being sick, we didn't let him CIO.
DS is a very active boy and I think CIO worked for him because he was able to burn off some extra energy. He sleeps really well now. I basically just put him in the crib after his bath, where he lays quietly there by himself or 20 minutes or so before falling asleep on his own. He rarely wakes up at night and if he does, he'll just fuss for a few seconds before going back to bed.
I don't know how you feel about having stuffed animals in bed with him, but we found that he started really becoming more comfortable with being in the crib alone when we added a stuffed animal in there with him.