September 2011 Moms
bluejetta
member
Anyone else planning sleep training soon?
bluejetta
member
I know this always brings out the comments. We're choosing to use Ferber's graduated waiting to help our LO disassociate some sleep associations -- it is harder and harder to put her down / back down and no one is sleeping. I know sleep regresses around 4 months and we love rocking her etc but since is not going easy and is losing sleep.
So, if you have or are - what age are you starting? Are you doing naps too or just night time?
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Re: Anyone else planning sleep training soon?
I did it at 11 weeks.
DS had been sleeping in our room in a bassinet or cosleeping up until then and I wasn't sleeping well so I wanted to move him to his crib in his room so I could get some sleep.
Prior to that he had been napping nicely in his crib so it's not like the crib was a foreign place. I started doing the "put the baby down drowsy but awake" method at probably 10 weeks, maybe a little earlier? That method worked wonders for us!! I'd get his eyes nice and heavy, turn on his mobile, put him in his crib and he was out in under a minute. If I rocked him to sleep he always woke up when I put him down.
At 11 weeks we started putting him in his crib at bedtime. At this point he was down to just one night feeding around 2am. We made 2 rules: he only eats if it's after 2am and we put a 15 minute limit on crying. The first night he woke around 10:30 and we let him CIO for 13 minutes. He woke up at midnight and cried 7 minutes. I fed him at his normal time and then he slept till 6am.
It took 6 nights of this until we had a "perfect" night which meant he only got up to eat. It's been a full week since that first perfect night and he's done great ever since.
CIO is hard. I couldn't have done it without DH's help. I wanted to throw in the towel a few times. And it actually got worse on night's 5 and 6. But once we got through it, he's a great sleeper now. Some people probably think 11 weeks is too young and that I'm a mean mommy, but I needed to get some sleep and he did great with it.
I hope it will work for us. We also have to let her have her hand free of the swaddle since she likes to suck her hand and I think it's key for self-soothing.
She does get up 2-3 times a night but usually only 1 is a real hungry need - the others are either habit or just inability to transition sleep cycles. I am trying to not feed her if it hasn't been at least 4 hours since I know she goes that long (has done 6) and will continue to gradually lengthen that if she doesn't do so herself since I know it isn't hunger waking her.
For me, sleeping training and moving him out of our room and into his crib in his nursery went hand in hand. I couldn't move him to the crib w/out sleep training. That was just my personal opinion.
At first I said I didn't want to think about it until he was 4 months.
Then I said I didn't want to do it until he was STTN.
But my need for good sleep won in the end and we made the move at 11 weeks. It gave me a week before going back to work so I would have to start work sleep deprived from doing CIO. We also are sending him to my mom's overnight on NYE so we wanted him used to crib sleeping well before that night.
So that's why we did 11 weeks. You've got to have DH on board though. There is no way I would have been strong enough to get through it w/out him. In fact, I put the monitor on his side of the bed and he was in charge of CIO. He turned the volume down low enough so only he could hear it and I actually slept through some of it.
A friend suggested the straight out extinction and it worked for her/ her kids. I'm not sure which feels worse to me in terms of going in or not. It might make her and me more upset so we'll start it and see how it goes.
we had to do straight up cio with shane. going in made things a million times worse.
blake doesn't need it. yet. Shane didn't either until he was 10 months old, so we'll see.