Part Two: Sleepless Nights no more

I left off when kids were 10 or so weeks old.

Just to recap the factors in the previous post:

• Schedule
• Full Feeding philosophy
• Routine

Our occasional nighttime help suggested a couple of techniques:

1. The Dream Feed: before we go to bed, gently pick up baby and feed him or her and them put them right back down (no diaper change, no burping)
   
2. The Hold Off: when baby wakes up, soothe, but don't feed him or her until 30 minutes or baby goes back to sleep.

Neither of these things worked one bit. Oh, sure, E would sometimes sleep four or five hours, which was quite a bit longer than N, but eventually, this began to wear upon us, because we were getting less sleep than before. And, I took our logs of the sleep patterns and ran some statistics which proved that any perceived difference between before we tried these techniques and after were imagined or based upon discarding non-conforming evidence.

So, we started to read Dr. Weisbluth's seminal work, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Again, a controversial figure, in that the advice to use the "extinction" method (what a word for it!) involves letting your baby cry. (I've linked above to the Amazon.com reviews since there are detractors and supporters there). This advice, plus the general wisdom that your baby must be 12 pounds and four months old before they are ready for this, had as waiting for the day they turned four months old.

"Sleep Training" via "Cry it out"

I will say right off: the buildup was worse than the actual experience. We were convinced that it would be torture, that they'd cry and cry and cry and every night would be a nightmare for us. We asked our doctor if this was going to harm them (he said no). We set up in advance the number of days we'd try this before giving up (5). We queued up bad movies on TiVo since we were pretty sure we couldn't sleep through the crying. We shared our anxiety with each other. We fretted about it for an entire month.

Friday, the day we started.

To this point, E and N had shared a crib. We had discovered in the hospital, on the first day, that when they were next to each other in the bassinet, they calmed down quickly. We thought that if we weren't going to come in and pick up the crying baby, eventually, the crying baby would wake his or her sibling. So we decided to give E, the better nighttime sleeper, the harder assignment: we put her in a pack-n-play in a different room. We gave them the Dream Feed, went to bed, and hoped for peace.

2:00 am: N cried for about five minutes

2:30 am: E started to cry.

3:30 am: E was still crying, and N joined in. We got up and started watching a bad movie.

3:45 am: N stopped crying.

4:30 am: E stopped crying. We went back to bed.

6:00 am: N woke up.

Saturday.

We felt like Friday wasn't as bad as we had expected. First of all, N only cried for 5 minutes one time and 15 minutes a second time, and we were convinced he would be the tougher one to get to sleep. E sure did work her lungs, and two hours seemed like forever, but she showed no ill effects the next day and the experience didn't drive us crazy after all. I think we were too tired to get too worked up.

2:45 am: N cried for five minutes.

4:15 am: E cried for five minutes.

4:30 am: N cried for five minutes.

5:40 am: N started crying.

6:00 am: E started crying, and we picked them up for breakfast time.

This felt like immediate improvement. No crying lasting more than 5 minutes, and we made it through the night without getting out of bed.

Sunday.

After putting them to bed and the dream feeds, we hoped for the best.

2:00 am: N cried for five minutes.

We awoke in the morning surprised. We hadn't heard E cry at all! N barely cried! Holy cow, we had a full night's rest!

By the end of the week, we had returned them both to the same crib, dropped the Dream Feed, and suddenly, we had lives again. We were putting the kids down at 7 pm, having dinner, relaxing, going to bed, and sleeping all night! We became vigilant: no going into the nursery after we put them to bed! Sometimes, one of them might cry within the first hour or so, but not for very long.

Since then, we've had only four nights where they didn't sleep through:

1. An extremely hot night (for San Francisco)
2. N rolled over and pinned E, causing her to wake up and cry
3. The next night, same thing. We countered by setting up the second crib and putting them in different cribs from then on.
4. (I forget the fourth one...)

All told, it now feels like a very long time ago, and we feel very fortunate that we have developed a solid enough routine that the kids seem to know what to expect. From time to time, they won't fall asleep right away, or wake up crying for a bit, but we've reached the point where we no longer even note the passage of those few minutes. The calculus is like this:

If we go in there, pick up our child, soothe our child, calm the child, get the child drowsy again and put them back down, he or she may very well cry again when we leave the nursery, and it'll be about twenty five minutes before they fall back asleep.

If, however, we leave them be, they'll be back asleep in about five minutes.

So there you have it. Two sleeping babies, one family life that has advanced into the next stage.