Sleep training

yeah it's been a relief because her sleep was getting so bad - she needed us to comfort her to sleep but was getting too big to be comfortably held so she'd just be tossing and turning.

Congrats on getting better neighbors and better sleep!

i'm starting to think we'll be embarking on some version of CIO next weekend (waiting until after our dr appt on wednesday)

ok, we kinda started this tonight. i'm giving a live action update. i put her down at around 11:20, set the alarm for 3 minutes. she cried hysterically. at 3 minutes i checked on her, didn't pick her up but i told her i loved her and that it's time for sleep. she cried for the next five minutes. i checked in again. ten minutes. checked in again. 8 minutes into the next set of ten, she finally just got quiet. i haven't checked in on her yet -- giving her a few seconds before i creak the door open to look (her mother is on the other side of the room as her so i assume everything is okay) -- but maybe she put herself to sleep? that would be awesome.

she's asleep. thank god.

hopefully it'll just get easier from here on out.

she pretty much slept through the night! a couple times she woke up, cried for a few minutes, but went back to sleep. she woke up at 8! pretty miraculous.

when we went through this I thought it was so strange to learn that sleep patterns are a learned behavior

cool that you guys are having some success with this stuff!
we're in a weird stage w/ our 26 month old where it is just totally unpredictable.
well, it's predictable that she'll go right to sleep, but she might wake up at 4;45am, 6am, 7am, even 8am sometimes. anytime before six, we're trying to go in and explain to her that it's not time to wake up yet. which has worked occasionally and also failed miserably.

this long weekend we're going to try to work on

* getting evie to go to bed and go to sleep without one of us being in there singing songs or holding her hand until she's totally asleep (which can take 45 minutes - an hour); and
* sleeping in her bed all night

any tips for either? i might actually sleep on the floor in her room for a night or two in hopes that she'll be more likely to stay in her bed and get used to being there all night. but i think both are just going to have to involve being tough and dealing with a lot of crying and screaming

dr. ferber imho

yeah i guess. that's what we did when she was a baby.

shes a bit old for that no? i think you at least need them not to be able to get up and walk! I have no advice for you since we still do this with a 6 year old although after reading a book and turning the lights out she does fall asleep in about 5 minutes so its not exactly difficult for us. We have progressed from last year when she insisted we lay in her bed with her. Now we get to sit on her beanbag and look at our ipads or whatever.

This thing helped immensely with her fears of the dark, btw:

http://www.dreamlites.com/Largeimages/rainbowunicorn.png

http://www.dreamlites.com/

Listening to him cry makes me furious. At myself, at him, at the stupid sleep experts. Thank god it finally seems to be working. We used a "chair method" (sitting on a chair next to his crib, every few nights moving the chair closer to the door). We don't have the collective stomach to let him cry in his room by himself so chair method was apparently more "gentle" but would take longer to work. It doesn't feel very gentle, though, to sit and watch him scream for up to 70 minutes every time. Poor wee man. He is 8 months old.

this long weekend we're going to try to work on

* getting evie to go to bed and go to sleep without one of us being in there singing songs or holding her hand until she's totally asleep (which can take 45 minutes - an hour); and
* sleeping in her bed all night

lol

as usual we made some progress on this and then we went on vacation and it all went out the window. she still comes in and gets in our bed every night and i don't know what to do about it. i wouldn't care except i'm not getting any good sleep bc i'm a light sleeper and she likes to be awkwardly pressed against me or kick me in the head or scrape me with her toenails. i end up on the couch every single night.

learn to sleep already

ha is that addressed to her or to me

that is addressed to my 7-mo old son

been doing the cry-it-out/Ferber thing for a few days, it's sort of working (altho not as quickly as it did with my daughter)

I gotta say nothing is funnier than my son glaring at me while angrily sucking on a pacifier

i wouldn't care except i'm not getting any good sleep bc i'm a light sleeper and she likes to be awkwardly pressed against me or kick me in the head or scrape me with her toenails. i end up on the couch every single night.

IANAP but I wonder if flipping this around would make her want to sleep in her own bed, i.e. figure out a way to make sleeping in your bed a really uncomfortable experience for her so that she just voluntarily goes to her own bed

it's really just a matter of making myself get up and put her back in her bed every time but that's hard when you're tired and drifting in and out of sleep and know that it's just going to lead to crying and yelling. at that moment it's a hell of a lot easier just to go sleep on the couch.

i moved to the couch and now they both end up on the couch with me. wtf?

you're just too snuggly I guess

I GUESS

justine, the only flaw in your suggestion is that little kids dont get uncomfortable. They can sleep in the craziest positons with people talking loudly over the top of them and they dont move

for example, trying to wake up H they other morning pp and I were having a whole conversation over him and then pp was clapping his hands and poking him and all WAKE UP and the response was continued, even snoozy snores

yes evie will occasionally try to sleep on the couch with me, which is worse. usually i get up and go back to bed and leave her on the couch and then lay awake worrying that she will sleep-pee on the couch.

so J's sleep is pretty terrible. he's almost 12 months now. like waking up every 1-2 hours, usually to nurse. his sleep has always been pretty bad, but there have been brief intervals of great sleep that make us think he's changing, but then he'll be teething or sick or in a growth spurt or its too hot or cold in the room and everything falls apart. as all you guys know, there's like 100 reasons you could come up with on the spot for an given fussy night, so it's hard to pinpoint what exactly is going on. it also doesn't always correlate to what kind of day he had, like if the napping was good, ate some good solid foods, had a lot of stimulation, etc. sometimes that stuff correlates to a good night's sleep, but not always.

newborn days were hell for sleep (obviously), but it was awesome from months 2-3, when he sometimes had 6-hour stretches and had maybe 2-3 brief wake-ups. at 4 months, shit fell apart pretty much and the longest stretches we'd get were 2-3 hours. it's been pretty much like that since then -- between 7pm bedtime and 6am wake-up for the day, he'll be up every 2-3 hours typically, sometimes every 1-2 hours on a really bad night.

there have been some good nights starting around 8 months, where he'd wake up maybe twice throughout the night. but every time we get a week like that, something happens and it all goes to shit - a cold, teething, who knows.

so bottom-line is we don't know what to do. we're trying to think of ways to really cut down the nursing during the night, but like i said, even a good solid foods day doesn't always equate to a good night's sleep. neither of us are really predisposed towards the "cry it out" method, and we have good evidence of J's crying stamina in other situations that we don't think it would be very successful. J's cried for 45 minutes to an hour straight in car rides, even when totally exhausted, burning out his throat and sounding like he's gonna vomit, so we're not keen to try that.

in my experience, you'll ultimately have to do some kind of "cry it out" method, unfortunately. there are gentler variations, like the ferber method - they take longer and are more of a pain, but they are gentler. i think you'll find that it will suck really bad for a night or two, but you'll start seeing positive changes pretty quickly.

Marcos, nip it in the bud. Do Ferber. It's not even really healthy for your baby to be waking up every 1-2 hours at 12 months, and it's probably making it harder for you to be good parents too.

And you have to make some rules for yourselves about the "exceptions" cuz right now it sounds like you have exceptions for everything (teething, growth spurt, bad day, etc.). I've been there buddy, but it ain't good. Sleep training is partly also about training yourselves, imo.

And especially if he is waking up to nurse, that means his stomach is accustomed to eating every 1-2 hours. I don't think it's going to get unaccustomed to that unless you change something, or at least it will take a very very long time to happen on its own.

agree that some version of "cry it out" has to happen. in my experience. we aren't quite all the way there yet with our lil guy (8 mos) who is still waking up at least once a night to nurse, and if he wakes up a 2nd time I put him back to sleep myself (no bottle etc.) So he'll sleep, but he needs to be held/rocked to sleep, and it will be letting go of that that I expect will involve a few nights of serious crying

I sometimes think human babies are probably best adapted to sleeping with their moms on a mat on the floor, and not sleeping alone in their cribs, and that's probably why we do indeed need to "train" them to sleep through the night in a crib. I'm not really a big believer in the primacy of supposedly "natural" human habits though, and I think we're pretty adaptable to a wide variety of modes of living. If you can handle co-sleeping, more power to you, but we couldn't. And if you're not going to co-sleep, it seems like some kind of crying method is required.

And especially if he is waking up to nurse, that means his stomach is accustomed to eating every 1-2 hours. I don't think it's going to get unaccustomed to that unless you change something, or at least it will take a very very long time to happen on its own.

yea based on the good nights we've had, (which only happen probably 25% of the time) there's some hope that he'd 'naturally outgrow' the need for night nursing. but i'm not confident anymore that that would happen anytime soon. night-weaning in some form has to be a serious part of this.

we don't co-sleep, which i'm grateful for. i feel like that would be an entirely different problem we'd then need to deal with -- how to get him out of our room as he grows older. at the beginning i think we liked the idea on principle but it just didn't work for any of us. not even really for J, b/c he couldn't handle us shifting positions or really moving at all. and we couldn't handle his moving, either.

also i have horror stories from my brother and his wife, who co-slept and had to "forcibly evict" their 3 year-old who still wanted to nurse throughout the night. that freaked us out enough to move j to a crib eventually in his own room around 6 months

how often does j nap? bee was a terrible sleeper until her naps were cut out. now shes often asleep in 5 minutes and for all of the night mostly. im guessing at 12 months there are probably multiple naps. can you cut out the last one?

IANAP(yet) but I was reading about sleep regression after aero's post either here or in another parenting thread and could that be part of the problem? I don't know what impact that would have on your approach but if it seems to fit, it might at least give you some hope for it being temporary.

I very very vividly remember being a small child and 1) not being able to go to sleep unless a parent was in the room with me and 2) getting up and getting in bed with my parents at every available opportunity (I even remember climbing out of my crib). It was 100% about being scared/anxious about something and there was such palpable relief at being nestled next to a parent. It was like toddler Xanax.

I was a generally a very worried little kid, though. I hope this child doesn't inherit that tendency, the poor thing.

fwiw, we've never enforced a policy of complete dead time all night or anything. We sleep in the same room for now, and we still often go to her if she calls out (which is rarely more than once a night), and if she gets completely hysterical then we absolutely go to her, but we do have a "no picking up" rule unless she's sick or something. We also found that picking her up never seemed to calm her down anyway, in fact she'd get more agitated as she came more out of sleep. But you have to learn your own child, they're all slightly different.

how often does j nap? bee was a terrible sleeper until her naps were cut out. now shes often asleep in 5 minutes and for all of the night mostly. im guessing at 12 months there are probably multiple naps. can you cut out the last one?

― "Max's Original Starship" Vol. 3 (sunny successor), Thursday, September 12, 2013 3:00 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wait, you went no naps at all? We did start a no naps after x hour policy at one point (now it's not an issue because she's down to one nap a day) because we found that if she woke up after 4 or so she couldn't fall asleep at night.

also i have horror stories from my brother and his wife, who co-slept and had to "forcibly evict" their 3 year-old who still wanted to nurse throughout the night. that freaked us out enough to move j to a crib eventually in his own room around 6 months

― marcos, Thursday, September 12, 2013 1:53 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean, we co-sleep and don't really have this problem. Maybe because we didn't really breastfeed, but my girl's almost 3 and sleeping with her doesn't bother us a bit. Our boy slept in the same room with us consistently until he was like 7 before we started to ween him off. I mean, as with all aspects of parenting, different people and kids are gonna have different results.

xp: if my girl falls asleep ever during the day, she's up until at least midnight. we've had an official no naps policy for almost a year now.

When are kids supposed to stop napping? Fuck.

Seeing the crazy sleep habits of the kids (and parents!) of some co-sleeping families we knew was definitely a factor in our decision not to do it, but it's so anecdotal, and I know a lot of people make it work. Anyway we were also terrified of crushing her and the few times we tried having her in the bed we couldn't fall asleep. We've occasionally had her in the bed on the road now and it's much easier because she's huge and not easily crushable.

K does seem to like sleeping in the bed with us, or with mom anyway, she seems kind of indifferent to sleeping in the bed with me.

evie seems to be in a transitional phase re: naps where if she takes a nap, it's a pain in the ass to get her down at night, but if she doesn't, she's loopy and passing out at 6:30. i assume she still takes a nap at school but i'm not sure.

Our worst phase was when she was getting tired around 3 or 4 o'clock, which was right when my wife would have to take her on a long car-ride to meet me as I was getting off work/she was heading to work.

Yeah I pretty much can't tolerate K by the late afternoon if she doesn't take a nap, sorry K.