Did Sleep Training Work-that depends

I don’t have my log book right here to finish out the next few days, but I can recap. Our little guy never went to sleep sooner than 9pm with the CIO method, even though we put him down at 6pm or 7pm depending on his sleepy signals and nap lengths. This is the same time he went to bed with not crying it out.

But I feel like I need to clarify some things to help determine if CIO worked or not, because in a way it did, in others it didn’t. Maybe we didn’t do it long enough. 4 days might not be enough to break the habits we have set for our guy. Because our guy has reflux and colic, we have held and cuddled and soothed our guy to sleep. Sometimes it works, other times not. Just because he is in our arms doesn’t mean he will sleep.  We’ve had to use what we call the parakeet method-use a blanket to cover his head so that there is nothing to look at and then he will fall to sleep.  But to recap, this is what a routine for him use to be:

Up at 5am not wanting to go back to sleep. We pull him into bed with us while he cries just so we can maybe get another hour or two before ACTUALLY getting up.

Eats at 7am and then gets tired by 8am but doesn’t want to go to sleep. He doesn’t cry, just doesn’t go to sleep.

Stays up the rest of the day only taking 20 min cat naps here and there. When he starts to cry during the day, I pick him up and have him cry in my arms. Some days it would be 5 or 6pm when cammon comes home and I hadn’t showered or EATEN anything and I would be exhausted, my milk supply would be suffering and nobody was happy.

I would eat and shower and go to bed at 7pm while cammon held the little guy and helped him fall asleep by 10pm or 11pm. But because he ate at 6pm he would wake up and not be able to go back to sleep because he was hungry. So I would feed him and then we would all go back to bed at 11pm or 12 midnight depending on when he woke up. Then he would be up again at 2am or 3am and then again at 5am. This routine HAD TO END.

So did crying it out work? Well, he still goes to sleep at 10pm or 11pm so no.

BUT, during the crying it out he would cry and cry and then finally fall asleep around 10pm. We wouldn’t wake him, but let him sleep until he woke up again. He seems to have lengthened out his eating time at night because he wouldn’t wake up until 3 or 4am. I can handle that, a stretch of 5-6 hours of sleep. And then he would go right back to sleep until 6 or 7am-so another 3-4 hours. Instead of getting rid of an early morning feeding, he got rid of the late night feeding. I’m okay with that. Getting more than 2-3 hours at a time has already made a huge change.  So in that sense, yes CIO worked because he sleeps longer at night.  I never meant for my son to be forced to sleep through the night.  When he doesn’t need to eat anymore, I believe he will fall back to sleep if he wakes up.  The purpose of CIO was to get him to sleep longer than 2-3 hours at a time.  Now that he is sleeping 4-5 and even one night 6-7 hours of sleep on his own, he is much happier when he wakes up in the morning.

Another thing I noticed is that he is establishing his morning nap.  It has stretched out to an hour.  That helps me to eat and shower so I don’t feel icky about myself all day and then I at least keep my strength up with nourishment in the morning.  And while he still wakes up crying, he is a lot more alert and easily soothed during the day when he takes his nap.

Yesterday he actually took a 30 min nap from 9:00am -9:30am  and then we played, he ate and went back down at 11:50am (babywise books say to keep them up after they eat so eat/play/sleep  but he is doing things backwards and seems to be fine)  He slept then from 11:50am to 1:15pm.   He then was all smiles and we played until I put him in the stroller and went for a walk.  At 3:30 he went back to sleep and slept for another hour.  So 3 hours of solid sleep during the day and I have to say, it was the most fun day we have ever had in a long time!  He was laughing and even rolled from his tummy to his back-although I think it was an unbalanced action rather than something he meant to do!

Anyway, so for right now we are happy with the schedule we are all on now.  It may not be the best and some may say we wimped out and it could be better, but for us, the purpose was to get him to sleep longer when he did go to sleep so that he won’t be so overtired during the day and we have achieved that.  We have a doctor’s appointment August 13th and I think we will reassess where we are and see if we need to correct anything or help anything along, but by then he will be 3 1/2 months old and not as cranky.