Margo à la Maude

Good question. How do you teach a baby how to sleep?

Beats me.

We're nearing the third full month of sleep training. Now, before I start to sound like we're zombie parents who haven't been getting any sleep, I should qualify this by saying that Maude has gotten better with time. But the notion of having her sleeping for eight hour stretches and sharing a room with Margo within a week of starting sleep training... those naive days seem like a distant, foolish memory.

From the beginning.

We decided that January 2nd would be the best time to start sleep training. Remember that our frame of reference was Margo, who slept for 12 hour stints within a week of starting to sleep.


Never compare kids.

We started with a bastardized version of the Ferber method, which saw us do a bedtime routine, get Maude used to the cues that it's time to start getting sleepy, and then let her cry it out, going in every 10-15 minutes to show her that we still exist.

The crying was hard. The method suggested that we would see gradual improvements, until bedtime a little whimpering, and then sleep. Donna and I considered it a successful night if Maude only cried for an hour, and those days were few and far between. We tried to stick with it, but after... I don't know, maybe 5 weeks, we admitted defeat. The bastardized Ferber method cost us about a total of 40 hours of crying.

On to the full-on Ferber method, defined as bedtime cues, then increasing the amount of time between check-ins until the baby cried herself to sleep. It would have worked well, except that Maude didn't get the guidebook, and never cried herself to sleep. Another three weeks worth or so.

You have to remember that by this point, Maude is still in a co-sleeper beside our bed, and the only method to get her to sleep, particularly if it was getting time for us to go to bed, is for Donna to nurse her to sleep. This meant that nor only did Maude cry for 1-2 hours a night, bu tDonna would give up her evenings, lying beside a sleeping Maude, who would wake with every stir.

I think that that became the norm for a while. In all honesty, the whole period is all a blur, with start and stop dates getting fuzzy, fuzzier by the day.

Then we moved the co-sleeper out of our room and into the computer/craft room. That started working better, but we now lost all access to that room after bedtimes.

We were even able to get Maude into Margo's room a couple of times.

But now, I think that we've plateaud. After letting Maude fall asleep in the office, Donna fed her, and I moved her into Margo's room. Now, post-feeding, she wakes up, and is bright-eyed when we move her in with Margo. Poor Margo is woke n up by crying and gurgling. Tonight, I finally move Maude back to the office, because she was gurgling loudly and squealing. Looking back, I noticed that Margo had covered her ears with Minou.

So... I don't know where sleep training is going. Maude is currently sitting behind me, gurgling and squealing LOUDLY.

And I've literally fallen asleep at the keyboard during this entry.

I have no clue what to do next, but we're coming on 90 days of sleep training soon.

So... tired...


- Michel

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27, 2009 at 11:16 p.m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.