So here I am, doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t do. I can still hear myself saying “that’s not my parenting style”. Or heck, I even wrote a blog post about how I was not going to resort to tougher measures to “sleep train” my baby (click here to read and laugh at/with me). But hey ho, desperate times require desperate measures. And as a parent I can of course choose – together with my husband – how to raise my child, and change my mind as many times I please. If only I wasn’t sharing it all online I wouldn’t feel silly now… But, my friends, I’d rather feel silly than tired because, indeed, we are sleeping better now – hurrah!
A short recap of our sleep history: Ever since she was 1-month old, Maia had slept reasonably well in her own bed – next to my bed for 6 months and then in her nursery – until she was 8-months old. She always fell asleep assisted, either being nursed or rocked to sleep by myself or her dad. This wasn’t an issue for us since she’d only wake up 1-2 times per night and needed to be fed anyway. It was our summer holiday travels (and our wedding) that I believe started the sleeping issues because we were out of the routine and away from home for four weeks in total. Then the teething started with her first six (!!) teeth appearing in August. Simultaneously Maia learned to crawl and to climb up to standing. With all this going on, Maia started waking up so frequently (hourly!) that we finally brought her in with us to get even some sleep ourselves.
I’m not opposed to the idea of co-sleeping at all and in some ways it’s lovely to have her with me but in practice it meant I still didn’t sleep very well and I got back pain from not being able to relax and stretch out in bed. We bought a new super king size bed so space wasn’t an issue but it still wasn’t ideal. Although Maia slept better with me, helping herself to the milk tap independently, we realised we had created a rod for our own backs because now she wouldn’t sleep alone at all!! This basically killed our peaceful evenings nor did I get a break at nap-time either – I was on baby duty nonstop! Enough to drive anyone crazy. It makes me a bit sad to admit that because I know that all she wants is to be with mummy, but I simply can’t be her human pacifier/lovey any more, as much as I love her.
Last Friday I hit my limit. After another crappy night, Maia refused to nap in her cot and I didn’t want to give in and get in bed with her (although I was tempted). I ended up walking around the neighbourhood with her in the pram for hours! I had caught the cold and the exhaustion made me nauseous to the point I was sick. I was so tired I actually cried, but Maia got so upset seeing me cry I had to stop immediately and give her a cuddle and tell her everything was ok (a lie). That’s motherhood for you right there. Can’t even cry, for god’s sake…
I shared my struggle with my mum friends, offline and online, and I got plenty of suggestions (thank you!!). I was recommended the book “Precious Little Sleep” by Alexis Dubief. I bought it straight away from Amazon (7£ for kindle version) and read it while having my hair done on Saturday (Daddy Daycare took over, phew). This is the page that made me do a 180 and go for the “Cry it out” (CIO) method despite having decided against it prior (see below):
In her book Alexis Dubief “said” everything I needed to hear. Sleep deprivation makes life pretty miserable and in that state it’s easy to doubt everything you’ve done as a parent. Never mind the social pressures and “well-meaning” comments and questions from family/friends/complete strangers… The general advice we get regarding sleeping is frustratingly conflicting not to mention that babies are different and change constantly. It’s really hard to know what’s the right thing to do or what even works for your family!! Trial and error again, as so many things with babies…
There is no need to teach a baby to sleep. They know how to sleep. Nor is there a way to stop them from waking up at night. In fact we all wake up at night, adults just wake up less than babies and rarely remember it in the morning. The key, according to my new best friend Alexis, is to teach them to fall asleep independently so that when they do wake up, they will fall back asleep without you.
What this involves is very simple: leave the baby to fall asleep on her own after making sure that she is safe, fed and comfortable. Following a bedtime routine is important to signal to the baby it’s sleep time. Also sticking to the usual bedtime (7pm for us) is important so that she’s tired but not overtired. The book suggests it’s better to leave the baby until they fall asleep and not going in to “intervene” (complete extinction) which is likely to just make the baby more upset and reinforce the “I cry and mummy will come”-association. However, this is a real tough one for most parents and many (including us) choose graduated extinction, going in at set intervals, which is emotionally easier to cope with. It’s really tough to see your baby so upset, for sure. But she will be absolutely fine and the outcome (better sleep) will benefit everyone. If the training is successful that is…
The 5-minute plan suggests to go in after the first 5-minutes and then lengthening the interval by 5-minutes every time (5-10-15-20-…) to check in with the baby and to give her reassurance that she is alright and everything is fine, without picking her up from the cot. If she’s standing up, we should gently show her how to lie back down careful not to get involved in the game of “baby stands up, you lie her back down, repeat”. On the second night you start at 10-minutes, on the third at 15-minutes and so on.
Note that this plan is not about weaning the baby off night-feeds and if she is used to being fed at night, she shouldn’t be just cut off but the weaning should be done gradually. But as said, weaning is a different thing from teaching the baby to fall asleep independently. I’m going to leave weaning off the (night)boob for later.
The second very important point dear Alexis makes is that the conditions the baby falls asleep in should be identical to those she wakes up to at night. This way she should have no problem to fall asleep again (if not hungry etc). This is why assisting the baby to fall asleep doesn’t work unless you intend to keep on doing whatever it is you’re doing all night long (or at least every time she wakes up). To paraphrase Alexis, if you kept on waking up on your front lawn despite falling asleep in your bed, you’d start getting anxious about going to bed too! Who knows what kind of alien moves you around while you’re asleep…
So, the conditions Maia is falling asleep in are: in her dark nursery, in her cot, with white noise on all night. When (not if) she wakes up, she’ll still be in the same room, same cot, it’ll be dark and the white noise is playing. This is the plan.
Since Maia has been getting quite a lot of breast milk at night (open bar so who knows how much…), I am nursing her at night. It says in the book that night nursing after midnight shouldn’t re-enforce the boob-sleep association which we are trying to break. So even if she falls asleep on the boob I don’t wake her up. But should she wake up before midnight, we would just repeat the 5-minute plan. I’m not sure how much and when she needs feeding at night so I’ll need to do some observing as we go on.
Finally an interesting point which differs from for example Gina Ford’s sleep training methodology is that until the independent falling asleep is established at bedtime and night-time, naps can still be conducted in whatever way has worked for you in the past. It’s much harder to teach independent falling asleep at day-time when babies are less tired and excited about, well you know, life. And all parents know that poor naps lead to overtired baby by the evening which can then have a knock on effect on the entire night. So our focus is on bedtime and nights for now! I either rock or nurse Maia to sleep in the morning and in the afternoon she sleeps in the pram.
It’s currently 8pm on Day 4 and Maia is fast asleep. I’ll follow-up with a post about how our sleep training has gone but – spoiler alert – so far we have been amazed by the results!! And we totally feel like silly first-time parents who made too big of a fuss about the whole sleep thing and just should have let Maia figure it out on her own sooner. Live and learn. 🙂
Sweet dreams!
Sini