Sleep Training

 

A while back I thought about sleep training Brady but we ended up finding our groove and he was sleeping pretty well. I nursed and rocked him to sleep every night. He fell asleep and went into his crib easily and slept well at night, waking only once or twice a night to eat. Once we got back from Utah though, things changed. Suddenly it became much harder to put him to bed at night. Once asleep in my arms, he would wake up as I laid him in the crib, so I would have to pick him back up and rock him a few more times to get him down for good. Even then, he woke up more frequently at night and I would pick him up and pace his room until he fell back asleep. He would then wake up for good at about 6 or 6:30 every morning...sometimes earlier. After a few weeks of that, I decided to revisit the sleep training thing. 

Now that he was 6 months old and I was TIRED, I felt a little more comfortable letting him cry for a bit in order to teach him to fall asleep on his own. I used the Ferber method and it worked pretty well. It's been a week since we started and I can now lay him in his bed at night while he's awake and he will just go to sleep with little to no (usually no) crying at all. He will wake once or twice to eat and sleep until 7:30 or later :)

Nap times are a little harder. He still cries during most naps, and sometimes cries enough (30 minutes, with me checking on him a few times) that we just give up on a nap...which is hard because then he's tired and crabby for the day. But today was a big improvement from the last several days. He cried for less than 10 minutes for 2 of his naps and didn't cry at all for his last one, so I'm hoping that very soon nap time will be as easy and painless for us both as nighttime is.