Dr. Ferber, Part I

After 8 months of less than ideal sleeping conditions around here, I finally got a book from the library to help me "solve my child's sleep problems," by Richard Ferber, M.D. This is basically a cry-it-out method, but with a plan so you don't feel like such a cruel parent. The idea is to help them learn to fall asleep on their own without sleep associations that involve help from the parents. No nursing to sleep, no rocking, no patting, no pacifier, even. Just occasional visits at increasing intervals to reassure the baby (and you). My primary goal for this is to get Henry to be able to fall back to sleep when he wakes up in the middle of night (without me having to go in and help). Here's how things have gone:

Day 1 (Thursday): Got off to a late start, as we were at Holy Thursday Mass in the evening. But he cried for 30 minutes before falling asleep for another 30. Then he cried for about 75 minutes before sleeping for 2 hours. This sort of pattern continued through the night, with both Henry and I getting a total of maybe 4-5 hours of sleep (Matt had earplugs and slept fine).

Day 2 (Friday): Nap times didn't go so well- 3 naps for a total of just over an hour. But the poor kid was totally exhausted, so we didn't go to the Good Friday service at all. Sigh. Night time was a little better, but there were still several long periods of crying at different points in the night. At some point I decided it wasn't working for me to go in, so I just stayed awake listening.

Day 3 (Saturday): Nap times were still a struggle. Finally in the afternoon I was so tired that I broke the "rules" and took a nap with Henry. I slept for an hour, he slept for even longer. It took him about 30 minutes to fall asleep that night, but from 9pm-5:30am, I didn't hear a sound from his room. Alleluia, indeed! He might have even slept longer if Matt hadn't felt the need to go in and poke him when he got up.

We're now on Day 4, and according the book, things should be mostly solved by this point. We did not have much success at naptime, though, so we'll see how the night goes. Let's hope he does even better than last night!