Sleep Training Your Child

I finally gave in and sleep trained Bubby. He'll be 10 months old next week and it was about time I stopped getting up at night with him and nursing him back to sleep. You're probably thinking "ABOUT TIME!" or "YOU WERE STILL NURSING HIM???" and all I can say is "IT'S HARD!" I had THE hardest time letting him cry it out, but with encouragement from several mothers and prayer's of protection over him, I finally decided to put him to bed, shut the door and not go back till the morning. I've done that for 4 nights now and WHAT A DIFFERENCE!! Here's how it went:

Night 1: 45 minutes of middle of the night crying

Night 2: 20 minutes of middle of the night crying

Night 3: Maybe 10 minutes of middle of the night crying

Night 4: I don't know if he cried...maybe a few minutes?

It's AWESOME! He's been ready for bed by 7 or 7:30 every night and he's been sleeping till 6 or 6:30 every morning, that means a good 11 hours of sleep for him! We used to put him to bed at 7 and he'd fiddle around in his crib till 8, cry several times throughout the night which ended up with me nursing him once, maybe twice a night, and then him being up and ready for the day at 5:30 or 6. But now not only is he sleeping better at night, he's taking much better naps too! He usually manages 2-3 naps a day (sometimes he still needs that early evening nap if he didn't get his sleep out during the afternoon one) and all of them range from 1-2 hours. If he wakes up before an hour and is crying I've been letting him fuss for 20 minutes to see if he'll go back to sleep.

I must say THANK YOU to all the mom's who have encouraged me for MONTHS to sleep train Bubby. The hardest part was listening to him cry for 45 minutes the first night (and thankfully Hubby was there to hug me when I was anxiously waiting for Bubby to stop crying) but now it's much easier and I prefer to have Bubby cry it out a bit.

*Today has been an off day, I think he's already taken 3 naps today, each of them about 45 minutes and crying it out just hasn't worked. We've been going back and forth from the crib to playing for a while now and he just can't figure out what he wants to do. I think part of it is that he's just starting to cruise around the furniture and his crib so he's just too excited to lay still.