Max started sleep school this week...
Our Star Student
We implemented this whole sleep training program a little earlier than expected as a few bad habits were started to form - the most influential was the fact that little Max had begun to wake up every two hours in the night. Two solid weeks of that and we were all beginning to get a little cranky! I have been reading up quite a bit about sleeping and learned that many babies need to be trained to sleep through the night and the reason that Max was waking so frequently was because he hadn't yet learned how to soothe himself back to sleep. As we had just began putting him in his crib at night (happily co-sleeping before that) I was running to him at the first peep, feeding him and tucking him back into bed - this settled into a nice soothing routine for him and he would contently fall back asleep...for two more hours.
Last Friday I was reading the "Sleep Sense Program" and Carmon and I agreed that we would start the training that night. First, we implemented a bedtime routine which includes a bath, massage, PJ's on, a short story and then a nurse before tucking him into bed. His soother is a thing of the past - I read that it was a sleep 'prop' and would make it harder for him to self soothe. Soother gone - check. He fell asleep quickly without a fuss - but that had generally been the norm anyway...we needed to wait until his first waking - that is when the true challenge would begin. Like clockwork, he awoke two hours from the time we put him to bed - we were to now wait between 3 and 10 minutes (whatever we could stand) before we went to check on him...the crying persisted and Carmon went in to reassure Max that we were still here, we loved him and that it was time to go back to sleep. The crying went on for about a half an hour, he finally settled down and fell back to sleep. Amazing! We agreed that I would now feed him once during the night so I did my duty at about 1 am and then he actually slept a stretch of 4 straight hours! That was night #1 and things have improved vastly over the past 5 nights - last night he awoke once to eat and then at 4 am he cried for 5 minutes and was back to sleep until 7 am. I can't tell you how great it feels to be in control of our evenings now and to be getting some quality sleep again. Max - you are a star student, straight A's, bravo! Let's keep it up!
Bath Time
A Relaxing Massage From Dad
...No Soother...No Problem!
4 comments:
Its amazing how getting a few hours of straight sleep and you begin to function normally again!! Dylan has been a 12 hour sleeper since like 5-6 months THANK GOODNESS!! Just wait for when teething begins and he may awaken once or twice in the night. And although they are not fun, you forget about those extra cuddles that you have been missing for so long that it doesn't seem so bad!! Way to go Max for getting the sleeping pattern down pat already!!!
What Max gets a massage everynight?
I'm going have to convince AJ that I need sleep training too and that I should get a massage every night!
Congratulations, to all of you.
Good for you two! This is a hard one, so I'm really glad to know you're being persistent .... though I saw with the most recent post that he's trying his 2 hour game again! Oh, children ...!
Henry's going through the 9 month sleep regression a little early and has been waking up through the night numerous times, after sleeping 11-12 hours solid for 3 months straight before this. It's about driving me crazy and I'm hoping he improves soon!!
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