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. :)