Last week, our precious little daughter sent us over the edge. Two nights in a row of keeping us up hours at a time because she wanted to be held while sleeping. And when I say keeping us up, she was snoring one of the times that I put her back in the crib and she immediately woke up and started crying again. SNORING!! Argh!! So, I started reading and formulated a gameplan.
The gameplan:
1) Get Alli out of the room so the baby could cry all she wanted to and I wouldn't worry about waking Alli up. We had thought about moving the baby to a different room, but then I thought that we might have another adjustment period after getting her back into her crib, so we decided to give Alli a special treat and let her sleep on a blow-up mattress in our room. She loved it!
2) Change our whole night time routine around. I realized that every time Natalie woke up in the night, she basically expected the whole night time routine again to put her back to sleep - bottle of water, fall asleep in mommy's lap, then put into the crib. So, to change her "middle of the night" expectations, I figured I would start by creating new "going to bed" expectations. I wound up changing the night routine to, give her 3 oz of water, hug and kiss her, and then put her in the crib and tell her to go to sleep.
3) Let her cry. With no fear of Alli waking up because of a wailing baby, we let Natalie cry much longer. So, the general rule was, let her cry for 5 minutes. If the crying level remained constant after 5 minutes, go in and try to calm her down. No picking her up. She was always standing at the side of the crib, so I would lean over and hug her, stroke her head, talk to her. She usually did not calm down, but I did that for a minute and then walked out again. Repeat for as long as the 5 minute interval had constant crying. I did find that after a while, she would cry, then stop, then cry. Once she got herself to that point, me going in just made things worse.
And so what happened? The first night, it took 45 minutes to get her to sleep. She woke up at 1am and cried, but wound down before the 5 minutes was up, so I never went in. At 4am, it was a different story, and we played the 5 minute game on and off til about 6am. (There were a couple of times in there that she feel asleep for 20 or 30 minutes before getting up and crying again. It was weird.) But then she fell asleep at 6am and slept til 7:30. Woohoo!!!
The second night when I put her to bed, she cried for just under 5 minutes, so I never even went back in. She woke up once at 3am crying, but I probably was to blame for that. I had gone in to check on her and put a blanket over her and she woke up. Talk about a guilty feeling sitting outside her door listening to her crying and knowing that I caused it. Agh! But she settled down before 5 minutes and went back to sleep. She slept til 6:30.
The third night when I put her to bed, she cried for maybe a minute. We heard one cry out of her at 11pm, which might have just been a very vocal rolling over. And she slept til 7:20am!!! YES!!! I WON!!!!
We are ready to move Alli back into the bedroom, much to her disappointment. By the way, because Alli is sleeping in our room, *she* is sleeping in later. Sigh. Maybe we'll have to do that on weekends just so we can feel like we get to sleep in! ;) haha
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