Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Sleep Training

It's the question everyone seems to ask: "So, is he sleeping through the night yet?" For the last two months, our answer has been a resounding "no". (Actually, our real answer has been largely unprintable, but for purposes of this entry, let's just stick with "no".) For a while, we coped surprisingly well. But somewhere along the way, our patience and adrenaline ran out, and we were left irritable and exhausted.

Ruth Ann, perhaps thinking that this would all be of interest to anthropologists of the distant future, took detailed notes of our day to day experiences of waking and sleep. Here's a taste, this from Monday, April 2: 8pm to bed; 10pm wake up crying, nurse back to sleep; 2am wake up crying, try to nurse back to sleep, cry some more, pace floors playing CD of hairdryer noise at maximum volume until 4am, finally go back to sleep; 6:30am, wake bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to begin day!

Apparently there are some babies who magically fall into a regular, sane sleep routine on their own. But Jonah clearly wasn't in that category, and so our options seemed limited. Between sorting through the information available from the internet, the profusion of books on "sleep training" for babies, and the limitless advice of well-meaning friends, colleagues, and pretty much anyone with two lips and working jaw muscles, we concluded that it all boils down to one of three options: co-sleep, cry it out, or walk around like a zombie.

After trying the walk around like a zombie option for a few weeks too many, Ruth Ann's resistance finally waned and we switched to cry it out. We had some differences of opinion on how to implement this method and so, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit, after a few false starts we ended up hiring a "sleep consultant" (who knew there was such a thing?!), who more or less instructed us to put Jonah down awake at bedtime, each nap and each night waking, let him cry for up to 45 minutes.

This was not fun. When you listen to your own baby cry, the minutes truly seem like hours. But the funny thing was that although we were agonizing over the crying, Jonah didn't seem to mind a bit. He'd sleep longer than he ever had before - night wakings went away in a couple days and he now sleeps 9-12 hours in a stretch! - and best of all he'd wake up full of smiles. Everyone seemed to notice his change in mood and new sense of contentment. And that for us was the proof in the pudding: happy baby, happy parents!