Since we have been very fortunate to have two healthy happy babies, sleep training has 100% been our most difficult challenge. The mounds of available books, programs, expert opinions, non-expert opinions, blog posts, apps, schedules, etc. only make an already complicated subject more dizzying. Clearly there is no cut-and-dried answer. If there were, this black hole of resources and options would be a simple list: do this, they sleep, no emotional scarring, congrats. Nope. “Go with your gut” mama impulses drown in a sea of conflicting information. If you’re a new mom, and you’re nauseously sleep deprived, and you want to sleep train, but don’t want to scar your baby, I know your pain. I’ve been living it for over three years now.
Having Lyla almost four years ago rocked my slumber-driven world. I have always needed sleep. Whether a teen sleeping in to the early afternoon, to being an adult and realizing I do actually like morning time the best, so I must retire to my chambers at 9pm, sleep was essential. Blessing bundle number one pops out and sleep suddenly becomes a rare luxury more valuable than Moira Rose’s wig collection and available only in very small stints. Miserable may seem dramatic, but going from 9 hours a night to 2 hours here and there absolutely drained me. Emotions suddenly go haywire, motivation drops, sugar cravings sky rocket, and well-intended folks inform me that their kid didn’t sleep through the night until they were 13. The only option to survive: sleep train.
I knew what we needed to do, I just wasn’t sure how. This is when the aforementioned black hole of sleep resources was opened. I’m sure friends cringed when they saw a text come in from me during these weeks. I was a suckerfish for advice and wisdom. I wanted to hear everyone’s suggested solution. After consulting basically every reference short of a crystal ball…..which I would’ve happily done if available…we got to work.
If you’re reading this, you already know all of the varying methods of sleep training a baby, so I will spare you the details. I will also say that I probably tried them all. Long story short, we couldn’t do it. Listening to my baby cry makes me want to jump into a highway and then roll off a cliff into an active volcano. Nothing shoots my anxiety through the roof more. Plus, I just wanted to sleep! It was quickly realized that going in, giving my beloved nemesis a bottle, and going back to bed= a quicker turnaround than listening to her cry for an hour. So we proceeded with this method…..for months….which then turned into years. There was always an excuse, even long after she was done with the bottle. She’s teething, separation anxiety has kicked in, she had a cold two weeks ago, maybe she had a nightmare, we’re damaging her by leaving her alone, on and on. If you’re stuck here, I get it! There is absolutely no judgment. Tim literally slept on an air mattress in her room for FOUR MONTHS!! She was two and a half and had one nightmare. This was our brilliant solution.
We basically created our own adorable monster. Lyla will be four in June and we still find ourselves getting up with her semi-regularly. I realize now we were playing the short game. We also weren’t doing her any favors with our methods, despite our intent. The idea of just letting her cry alone in her room trapped in a crib broke my heart, but the result was a sleep deprived kiddo whose parents were becoming more haggard by the day. When Rose came along we knew our sanity wouldn’t hold together if we proceeded in the same fashion.
After going back down the rabbit hole, weighing the different methods, and almost paying $100 for a highly acclaimed book/method that would supposedly solve our problems, I shut it all down. I put the noise away and went into intuition mode. Best piece of advice from this round of searching: “you are not being a bad mom for teaching your baby to put themselves to sleep. You are allowing your baby to not be sleep deprived”. This helped. This took some of the guilt away. I took this to heart, got a plan together, gathered my go-to oils for anxiety, and did the following:
We already had a bedtime routine thank goodness. If you don’t have this, then this is where you want to start. 7pm is bedtime for both girls so at around 6:30, we start getting ready. For Rose, this includes a bath (every second to third night), clean diaper, jammies on, quick story (she mostly tries to chew the pages), rocking in a dark room while having her bottle, short snuggle and burp, and lay down. This goes pretty seamless for Tim most nights. I typically am putting Lyla to bed simultaneously. When we first implemented a bedtime for Rose she was around four months. It took a few nights of crying to get her to not need to be rocked to sleep. We chose the cry it out method. This was hard, but not as rough as listening to her in the middle of the night. If you haven’t done this yet with your babe, get to it. We realized we needed our evenings back to relax, watch a show, eat dinner together, etc. Go ahead and knock this out first.
Next, comes the dreaded night wakings. I personally was not ready to take this step until she was six months old. I had discussed this with my pediatrician and she gave me the go ahead with the reassurance that Rose was perfectly fine making it through the night without a feeding. We again chose to just let her cry. Y’all, I won’t sugar coat it. It was gut wrenching and made my skin crawl to lay there at 2am listening to her cry, but we had motivation to get through. We knew what the future held and didn’t want yet another three years of night wakings, so we stuck it out. It took about 3 nights and then magically she did it….and then for another 3 nights….and then a regression. This can be discouraging, but it’s normal! She will still wake up on occasion and since it’s random now, we put a cap on the crying just to make sure she’s ok. If she cries for more than 45 minutes, we check in on her. In our experience, she usually just wants to play and as soon as we walk in, we get the enormous jack o’ lantern four tooth grin.
I hope this helps guide you, but my biggest piece of advice is to research, discuss with your doctor, discuss with friends, and then shut out the noise and listen to your mama bear instincts. They’re there, but are often hard to hear with all of the outside input that’s available to us 24/7. If getting up with your little one is your favorite thing and sleep isn’t so important, then do it! If you’re a zombie and need some relief, then pick a method, stick to it, and look forward to the full nights of rest that are on the horizon!
What is your best tip for sleep deprived parents?
