CIO

Everyone else in this house is sleeping, and I have been writing and sipping coffee. It's lovely.

On Monday and Tuesday I reached a breaking point with Amelia and the sleep thing. I was so, so tired. Bone tired, literally. Achy. Grouchy. I was standing in the market Tuesday, trying to buy lettuce and cheese, thinking it was the most difficult thing I had ever done. And it WAS kind of a hassle, because it was a tiny DC market whose aisles are too narrow for the stroller, and because I had forgotten the bike lock I had to park the stroller in a corner and carry the diaper bag, the groceries, and Amelia-who-lunges-at-all-she-sees, which was particularly difficult when it came time to pay. But in a dim corner of my brain, the thought occurred to me that this shouldn't be THIS hard, and that I should no longer be THIS tired.

So I turned to Dr. Wiessbluth.

I have done my share of complaining about Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. I tried his methods around 5 months and they simply did not work. But we had made some progress with Amelia's sleep--she has been pretty consistently going down for a 1-2 hour morning nap, and without nursing to sleep. She nurses, then I put her in the crib, "drowsy but awake," and she cries. I come downstairs, set the kitchen timer for 10 minutes, and usually within 7 minutes she is asleep. If she is still crying hard after 10 minutes, I go soothe her, and we try again.

This method had started working for her afternoon nap, too, although if she does go down in her crib in the afternoon, it's usually only for 30-40 minutes. And I had made some progress in soothing her to sleep without nursing her, by turning her on her side and rubbing her back, sometimes holding her hands. But she was still waking up about 4 times a night, and I was nursing and rocking her back to sleep each time. I was back in bed in less than 10 minutes, but I was never getting more than 3 hours of sleep at a time. And on top of it all, Amelia was waking up for the day at 5 or 5:30 am. Once she got up at 4:30. Thank goodness, Luli was here that day, and they were early birds together.

So Wednesday night, we started CIO. Crying It Out.

There are lots of variations on crying it out, but we decided to go with full extinction, in which the baby cries and you don't go to her. (Dr. W says to remember that you aren't doing "nothing," that you are "letting the baby learn to go back to sleep.") My experience is that when I go in to Amelia at night, she wants to nurse, and it just makes her madder if you pick her up and put her back down. There is a variation where you wait 5 minutes, then go soothe, for 2 nights, and then wait 7 minutes for 2 nights, and so on, but that requires more time and effort, and my experience is also that when I get up with A, I want to do whatever it takes to get her back to sleep ASAP, and I could see myself just giving up with that method in 3 or 4 nights due to exhaustion. So Dean and I talked it over, decided we were both up to the task of letting her cry, and that our limit of how long she would cry would be an hour.

Wednesday night she woke up at 9:47 pm. Dean and I were in bed but not asleep yet. It actually made it easier that she woke up so early because I KNEW she wasn't hungry at 9:47 pm. She cried loudly but not hysterically for 30 minutes, then went to sleep. Success! I had more trouble sleeping. I was imagining that she was quiet because she had tangled herself in her blanket and strangled to death. After 30 minutes more of this fun thinking, I crept in her bedroom and peeked in her crib. The blanket was kind of wrapped around her legs, but she was fine. She cried for another 30 minutes at 1:40, then woke up and cried at 5:20. I just got up with her then, as I didn't want to feed her and put her back down, and I had had enough of listening to her cry. Plus, since I am used to feeding her 4 times a night, there was milk everywhere.

On Thursday morning, I realized A had a little cold. Turns out the baby of the mother who seduced me with crying it out at a playgroup on Monday WAS contagious, after all. So I worried all day about what we would do Thursday night. If A was sick, I didn't want to just let her cry, but if she wasn't crying due to her cold, I didn't want to ruin everything from the first night. We decided that if she cried a lot more or a lot worse than the night before, we would check on her, but otherwise we would keep going. Thursday night, she slept till 3:30, then cried for an hour. Since that was our limit I went to her, nursed her, and put her back down. She slept till 7 am!

Last night, her sniffles were much better, so I wasn't as worried. She slept till 12:30 or so, cried intermittently for about 30 minutes, then slept till 5. She fussed a bit, so I got up and fed her about 5:30, and she went back to sleep! She babbled a mildly fussy babble till about 6, and now, at 7:28 am, she is STILL ASLEEP!

So, all in all I think we are successful so far. I am definitely already getting more rest, and Amelia is too. I still suspect the CIO method isn't as foolproof as it gets credit for being, and I don't expect that all of our sleep issues are solved forever, as nice as that would be, but this method seems to be a good one for us right now. We'll see how it goes over the next few weeks. We have a lot of traveling in our futures.