Baby sleep
Xander is 4 months old! Time is going by so so fast and he changes all the time!
Obviously I failed at the photo challenge...I'm just having so much trouble making sure I get enough sleep that I was missing days and then I just decided to not stress about it.
Xander is doing lots of new things. Just in the past couple of weeks he's added lots of sounds to his repertoire.
The above was saved in LJ from my attempt to post FOREVER ago. I just jumped on cause I typed out this long thing in my online moms group and wanted to put it in my journal...it's about my experience with attempting cry it out (CIO) to get the baby to sleep:
My experience so far...Xander was refusing to sleep. We were having 4-5 hour meltdowns at bedtime. Literally the moment the sun would start setting if we even thought about a baby being asleep he would start fussing at us and it would just escalate until I'd be walking up and down the street with him wide awake with puffed up red eyelids and big huffing breaths as he tried to get in air through his congestion from screaming, me with a migraine from lack of sleep and stress from feeling my husbands frustration as well. I cried. A. Lot.
One night he suddenly just started sleeping. Then the screaming fits came back 2 days later. He was obviously just totally exhausted and I never had a happy baby for more than a couple of minutes at a time.
We started researching stuff (I was swearing up and down that he was too young for it, found out I was wrong cause I hadn't read anything about it yet). We started a sort of cry it out (I was picking him up and rocking him) that I totally broke down on the first hour and it took 4 hours to get him to sleep. Then we discussed it (when the baby wasn't screaming) and decided to give it a full try.
My husband started with a nap. He got an hour of sleep out of the baby after 10 minutes of fussing lightly. We put him down last night and did the 3-5-5 and he was out in 20 minutes with not a single actual scream. I cried. In relief.
Last night we put him down and were planning to do 3-5-5 again. We got through 3. The first 5 we didn't hear a peep from him. We checked on him anyway and he was still a bit awake. He had lost his pacifier, we gave it back and after 5 minutes of silence checked again and he was asleep. That lasted from 8:10pm till 11:15pm (he needed his last night feeding). He went straight to sleep after his bottle and was asleep from 11:45pm till 4:45am. At 3, 3:45 and 4:30am he woke up and made a quick noise, we put the pacifier back in and then at 4:45 he made a different cry because he was hungry. Gave him his bottle and he's been asleep again since 5:15.
He also took real naps yesterday and went to sleep for those with almost zero fuss. Xander hasn't taken more than a 30 minute nap for almost a month and yesterday he slept for almost 2 hours for both his big naps and still had another half hour nap.
I have no idea if it will keep going, but it was obviously the right thing to try for us and really has been less of a CIO than we were doing before when it was more like ScreamIO.
Plus now, when he's awake we have a super happy sweet baby. The difference is amazing just in how my husband interacts with him. There is much more actual enjoying baby time going on in our house now as well as some actual sleep.
Obviously I failed at the photo challenge...I'm just having so much trouble making sure I get enough sleep that I was missing days and then I just decided to not stress about it.
Xander is doing lots of new things. Just in the past couple of weeks he's added lots of sounds to his repertoire.
The above was saved in LJ from my attempt to post FOREVER ago. I just jumped on cause I typed out this long thing in my online moms group and wanted to put it in my journal...it's about my experience with attempting cry it out (CIO) to get the baby to sleep:
My experience so far...Xander was refusing to sleep. We were having 4-5 hour meltdowns at bedtime. Literally the moment the sun would start setting if we even thought about a baby being asleep he would start fussing at us and it would just escalate until I'd be walking up and down the street with him wide awake with puffed up red eyelids and big huffing breaths as he tried to get in air through his congestion from screaming, me with a migraine from lack of sleep and stress from feeling my husbands frustration as well. I cried. A. Lot.
One night he suddenly just started sleeping. Then the screaming fits came back 2 days later. He was obviously just totally exhausted and I never had a happy baby for more than a couple of minutes at a time.
We started researching stuff (I was swearing up and down that he was too young for it, found out I was wrong cause I hadn't read anything about it yet). We started a sort of cry it out (I was picking him up and rocking him) that I totally broke down on the first hour and it took 4 hours to get him to sleep. Then we discussed it (when the baby wasn't screaming) and decided to give it a full try.
My husband started with a nap. He got an hour of sleep out of the baby after 10 minutes of fussing lightly. We put him down last night and did the 3-5-5 and he was out in 20 minutes with not a single actual scream. I cried. In relief.
Last night we put him down and were planning to do 3-5-5 again. We got through 3. The first 5 we didn't hear a peep from him. We checked on him anyway and he was still a bit awake. He had lost his pacifier, we gave it back and after 5 minutes of silence checked again and he was asleep. That lasted from 8:10pm till 11:15pm (he needed his last night feeding). He went straight to sleep after his bottle and was asleep from 11:45pm till 4:45am. At 3, 3:45 and 4:30am he woke up and made a quick noise, we put the pacifier back in and then at 4:45 he made a different cry because he was hungry. Gave him his bottle and he's been asleep again since 5:15.
He also took real naps yesterday and went to sleep for those with almost zero fuss. Xander hasn't taken more than a 30 minute nap for almost a month and yesterday he slept for almost 2 hours for both his big naps and still had another half hour nap.
I have no idea if it will keep going, but it was obviously the right thing to try for us and really has been less of a CIO than we were doing before when it was more like ScreamIO.
Plus now, when he's awake we have a super happy sweet baby. The difference is amazing just in how my husband interacts with him. There is much more actual enjoying baby time going on in our house now as well as some actual sleep.