Last night Amelia slept till 1:45, then cried. She only ended up crying for about 10 minutes but it was much, much harder for me to deal with last night than it was the previous nights. I was awake until after 3am delving into my deeper concerns about crying it out, which I had buried for the purpose of the experiment.
The CIO success story most parents tell sounds like this: "We let our baby cry it out for 3 nights. Each night the baby cried less and less, till on the 3rd night there was no more crying. And ever since the baby has slept from 7pm to 7am!"
So this does not seem realistic to me, or even possible. These babies NEVER cry at night again? This cannot be the case. And so my question is, what do you do after the initial "crying it out" period? Say Amelia sleeps well for the next 3 or 4 nights, then one night cries a whole lot? Obviously I will want to go comfort her, but if I end up nursing her back to sleep, is everything ruined? I guess I need a new, nursing-free plan for comforting... but last night, for example, I was thinking how Dean and I are both stuffy because of our colds. Amelia's cold seems all gone, but what if it isn't? What if her throat hurts and she just wants a drink? If she were older and were calling for a drink of water, I would certainly give her one, not make her thirstily cry herself back to seep. But then on the other hand, if she were older and were just calling for a glass of water to postpone sleeping... I would have to try to break that habit.
Sigh. Welcome to parenting, I guess.
It's just frustrating, because the one consistent piece of advice I've been given regarding baby sleep, no matter the method, is to "be consistent." But the one thing it seems that you can count on with babies is that nothing is ever really the same, even from day to day! So when you are adapting to change all the time, it's hard to be truly consistent.
It's easy, relatively speaking, to resolve to let a baby cry it out for the sake of learning how to sleep, especially when you are super exhausted and are hopeful about the possibility of more sleep in a matter of days. But it's a lot harder, I think, to figure out the right long term plan for balancing nighttime crying and nighttime comforting. If anyone has the magic answer, let me know.
1 comment:
I'll tell you what to do about the crying if you tell me what to do about the hitting. I get sleep at night, but I'm a punching bag for like two hours of the afternoon and evening.
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