Crying It Out

Hubby is traveling. Don't know how long he'll be gone for work, but so far we're 60 hours in. And so far so good! I was afraid I'd be exhausted already, and I'm not. So far I've been pretty good about going to bed at 10p. (In that I did it once out of two nights, but hey, I'm counting that as "pretty good"!)

Saturday and Sunday night, Jack SLEPT THROUGH THE NIGHT. (For future reference, he is 7 months and a week old as of Saturday.) He basically slept from 6p-7a. Last night was a different story. He woke up at 2:17a. I'd already talked to one of the pediatrician's nurses about the "cry it out" method. Jack sometimes wakes up and doesn't cry out with his "I'm hungry" cry -- it's different. A bottle will solve things and send him right to dreamland. But while it gets him back to sleep, hunger isn't what wakes him up.

Rewind to last night. At 2:17a it was more of an off-and-on whimper. With Hubby away and only one person's sleep disturbed, I'm going to try letting him CIO. One day in and I'm feeling good about it. He never hit his full-blown cry, and he got softer and more intermittent as minutes wore on. At a half hour, at the nurse's suggestion, I went into his room and rubbed his back, not saying a word. I offered him his pacifier. He took it, rejected it, took it, rejected it. I soothed him a bit more then left his room. I told myself I'd give him until 3:17a at which point I'd feed him. After about 2:50a he was going a minute or two in silence... would whimper/cry for a minute... then more silence. He and I were both out cold by 3:17a.

The next time he woke up and cried I was going to feed him. But that didn't happen until 7! And he woke me up by cooing and playing, not crying. He smiled when I came in to get him and was giggling. He needed his bottle a little quicker than he did the previous two nights (when he slept through the night without waking up and crying for more than a few seconds)... but I consider it a success. Had he woken up at 3:30a or 4a I'd have considered it a failure. I feel like that would have shown that he really was hungry and all I'd done was torture him for a few hours. That did NOT happen and so I feel good about letting him CIO last night. Ideally he'll sleep through the night without interruption. But if he wakes up (and isn't hungry), hopefully it will take less and less time for him to soothe himself back to sleep.

But I definitely prefer the nights when he sleeps through the night nice and soundly. :)

Naps

Naps remarkable things for me, for so many reasons. Sometimes I put Jack down and he goes right to sleep. Other times he sits right up (a new trick!) and plays and shrieks and sings... and then cries before falling asleep. Other times he fights it tooth and nail and it's a #napfail. This morning I put him down when I "felt" like it should be nap time. He woke up at 7, had a 5oz bottle and later ate some squash and zucchini (new today) and then a smaller 3.5oz bottle. Then it was 9:45, so I changed his diaper and put him down. He wasn't exhausted, his eyes weren't puffy. But he rolled over and by the time I came back a few minutes later to check on him after putting a load of laundry in... he was out cold. (As an aside -- he's really effing cute sleeping in just a diaper. Less cute when he spits up some squash on his shirt... but maybe it's because he knows he'll out-cute the situation by sleeping nekkid.)

And the fact our babies fight naps. It's so funny that most adults will nap any time they're allowed, but children treat them like punishments! I was chatting with another mom the other day, saying, "Don't they know they'll be so much happier after their nap? Just go to sleep! You'll be happier for it!!"

Someone is up from naptime... :)