Sleep Training

A new parent has many concerns. First and foremost they want to know their child is healthy. Every sneeze, cough, rash and vomit has the new parent turning to their new parent handbook (for us it was The Baby Book by Dr. Sears. We outgrew that phase. I don't think I've cracked the book open in at least a month.

Some concerns are more about the parents and less about the baby. The biggest of which is, "When will the baby sleep through the night?" It is one of the first questions family, friends, co-workers and strangers will ask, "How does he sleep?" If your answer is a groan as you rub your crusty eyes and absent-mindedly run your hands through your hair which causes you pause as you think not about the baby sleeping but when was the last time you washed your hair, then you will get lots of advice on how to ensure the baby sleeps, or promises that the baby will sleep when he reaches 10 pounds, or 15 pounds or 6 weeks, or 10 weeks or 3 months or 6 months. At some point people just look at you in disbelief. How can he not be sleeping through the night? What on earth am I doing to him to make him wake up?

Gavin hasn't slept through the night since before we went on vacation in April. True. For 2 or 3 glorious weeks he slept 10-12 hours a night. It was amazing. It was short lived. So very short lived. It gave me a taste of rest.

Recently Gavin's schedule has been to wake up 3 times a night. The first feeding didn't bother me because I was awake anyway. 11-3-6 (roughly) has been his schedule. This past week he has been waking up every 2 hours which is obviously unacceptable. So here I am at 1:30 in the morning, awake. Tired. So very tired. He woke up at 11:45 and I went into his room to offer him some milk (ala bovine) but the more I tried to offer him his sippy cup the more he screamed. Seriously. He was screaming. Forget crying. He wanted milk from the tap and he wanted to be in my arms and at said tap. Being the gentle loving mother that I am, I patted his back and spoke to him in soothing tones even though he couldn't hear me over the ear splitting screaming. I eventually left his room and within in moments he was asleep.

And so it has gone for an hour and a half. He screams, I offer his sippy cup and pat his back and provide some comfort and after being rejected I leave and he falls asleep for a few minutes. He has been asleep for 30 minutes now but I don't know if I should try and fall asleep or not. As soon as I drift off I just know he's going to wake up.

The next time he wakes up he get milk from the tap since it will have been 5 hours since he went to bed for the night. That is the goal. To get him to sleep at least 5 hours between feedings. He is certainly old enough. His doctor had me do this sleep training after his 9 month check up. She said it would take 3 nights and she was right. She also said right around a year or so to expect more sleep issues. Right again.

So we are back to sleep training. During the day I am making a great effort to feed him more solids and to give him a big dinner so his tummy will stay full longer.

I really need this to work. I am exhausted. Ryan really needs this to work too because I'm going to start calling on him on weekends to give me a night off. I can't believe I function as well as I do with so little sleep. Granted waking up with Gavin now is nothing at all like waking up with him when he was a newborn. Then just feeding him took at least 45 minutes. That was crazy.

I'm going to go to sleep now. And Gavin will take that as his cue to wake up. And round and round we go.