Greg and I forayed into the dark, dark world of sleep training last night. It was miserable. Veronica wailed. I cried. Greg was mean.
Admittedly, we tried a not-very-thought-out version of the famous CRY IT OUT method. Over the last six weeks we've had our fair share of rough nights and it just felt like it was time to do something. Anything.
Here are our sleep problems. I know all of you out there without kids are on the edge of your seats.
Scenario number one is some nights it's just hard to get her to go down. This means that she'll fall asleep nursing as we watch a dvd after dinner and then I let her snooze in my lap for a while, making sure she's really asleep. Then I tiptoe back to the nursery with her and oh-so gently place her in the crib, at which point she sits straight up and starts crying. Awesome.
The rest of the scenario plays out like this: I sit in the glider in the dark and nurse her back to sleep. I watch the clock, listen to her little snores, gently place her down again. Tip toe out of the room, relieved that she's still asleep. I settle back down on the couch, turn on the monitor and five or ten minutes will go by before she starts crying. At this point there might be some swearing on my end and some stomping back to the nursery.
Usually Greg tries to intervene and he goes in and tries to rock her. Sometimes this works, sometimes she just escalates. Half the time I don't let Greg go in because I assume I'm going to have to do it in the end anyway so I may as well go in now. We both get mad. The whole thing takes an hour and a half. Awesome.
She generally stays down after the third or fourth time and will then sleep from 4-7 hours in one stretch. Then she'll wake up to nurse once and then sleep again until morning. Not bad, were it not for the difficulty of getting her to sleep.
Scenario number two is that she goes down quickly and easily. There's no need for multiple attempts and we go to bed feeling pretty good about it all. However, this is the scenario in which she goes down easily but wakes up multiple, multiple, multiple times throughout the night. This is the scenario in which both myself and Greg are up and out of bed over and over again all night and this is the scenario in which she'll finally sleep a good solid stretch but not until after 4am. And yes, this is the scenario in which Greg and I go to work bleary-eyed and disillusioned with parenthood and missing our former lives when we were young and savvy and sexy. Awesome.
Sooo...yesterday I read some emails from friends offering advice, watched some sleep-training videos on Baby Center and revisited all the books I'd read this fall about how to do this. Finally, Greg and I decided that since it was 8pm and she seemed sleepy we'd just try to put her down and let her cry and go in at 3 minute intervals to comfort her.
First we both went into the darkened nursery with her and I sat in the glider with her in my lap as we sang The Wheels on the Bus to her. She smiled. She had no idea what was coming.Then Greg placed her in the crib and we began to back out of the room. She was up and standing, her little hands on the top rung of the crib, CRYING, before we even got out of the room.
In this scenario folks, I lasted one minute. One minute. We didn't even have the monitor on. Her cries were so loud and so distressed that I was able to sit on the couch for only one minute before I literally sprinted back to the nursery to scoop her up, her little tears wetting my cheeks as I kissed her.
Oh, and this is where Greg got really, really mad at me and really, really disappointed with me. Even more than the time I refused to play Balderdash with him right after I'd moved to Chicago and he got so upset about it that I could tell he was wondering if he'd made a terrible mistake by asking me to move here from LA.
Anyway then we stood in the living room and talked about it. Or rather I stood, holding Veronica, while Greg sat on the couch pretending to half talk to me and half look at the computer because he was still so mad at me for only lasting one minute.
Finally, I agreed to try again. This time I lasted three minutes and in this scenario Greg may have tried to physically block me from approaching the crib and I may have hit him in the chest. Um, yeah.
We all took longer to recover from that one, as in Greg didn't talk to me for half an hour and I cried for ten minutes. Finally I nursed V to sleep, like always, on the couch. And then, of course it was a great sleep night. I put her down once and she did a 6 hour stretch, woke once to nurse and went right back to sleep for another 4 hours. And Greg and I are doing fine now, by the way.
Okay, I'm really asking. How do we do this??
I seriously can't listen to her cry like she did last night. My whole being reacts to it in a physiological way. The thing is that she's really a great baby. She never cries unless she hits her head or is sick. So to hear her all-out wail, to know that she's standing up in the crib with tears streaming down her face, is more than I can bear.
I totally get that sleep training helps babies learn to soothe themselves and go to sleep on their own and I do want that for her...and for us, but not at the expense of torturing her and myself. My new plan is to only try the cry-it-out method when she wakes up multiple times after we try to put her down to sleep. I think that this plan, as opposed to the just coldly putting her down when she's not even asleep yet plan, might work better for everyone.
But we seriously need help over here. Sleep training FAIL.
