Sleepless Nights

During pregnancy you constantly hear things like "get your rest now, you won't be getting any later" or "you better stock up on sleep" (like this is possible). The truth is, you haven't known exhaustion until you've been a parent with a newborn. Even if you try really hard to imagine how tired you will be, you really can't understand it until you've been there.

When I was pregnant, I read tons of sleep books and thought I had it all figured out. I would read my son's sleepy signs, make sure he didn't get overtired, put him to bed drowsy, and he would be great sleeper. Little did I know, it doesn't always work out so nicely.

When Cole first came home from the hospital, he was a great sleeper. He would fall asleep anywhere and sleep for hours at a time. At night he was sleeping in 3 hour stretches...pretty good for a 1 week old. I started to think, that this sleep thing was going to be easy.

Suddenly, without warning or reason, my great sleeper stopped sleeping. Around 8 weeks, he wanted to be held for every nap. If I put him down he's scream. He started waking up anywhere from three times to ten times a night. A few weeks after that, he stopped falling asleep on his own, he wanted to be bounced to sleep. And not just normal bouncing, he wanted you to do squats while holding him. After a few months of sweating my ass off every time my baby needed to nap and spending all night replacing Cole's paci, my husband and I decided that we had to do something. We could not go on like this.

The first thing we did, was cut out night feedings. At 6 months, he was still eating 3 times a night. We were able to easily cut out the first 2 feedings of the night, but kept his 4:00 am feeding. However, we were still up several times to "bounce" him back to sleep or put his paci back in his mouth.

About 2 weeks later, we decided we needed to take more drastic measures. We read Ferber's Solving Your Child's Sleep Problems and gave it a try. It was hard (very hard) on me. I spent the first two nights crying with Cole. But by night 3, we put him down in his crib awake at 7:30pm, he feel asleep without a sound and slept until 7:00am. He has been sleeping through the night ever since!