Lilypie First Birthday tickers
Lilypie Third Birthday tickers

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Tough Love

At Clara's 4 month appointment the doctor said that it was time for some "tough love" when it comes to sleep.  He said that based on her age and weight she should be able to go at least 8 hours at night without eating.  He suggested starting sleep training sometime before 6 months, but we decided to jump right in.  Our thought was that this gave us some time to try it out - if it went horribly, we could wait a couple of weeks and try again.  And, let's be honest, when you haven't slept in months and you get the gree light to make it better, you don't really want to wait around!
To give you a little background, Clara has been progressively lengthening her night time sleep up until I went back to work for a two week stint at 10 weeks.  She was going around 5 to 6 hours at night before that, and one time had even slept for 8 hours!  Then, the week I went back to work, we went backwards quickly, all the way to 2 and 3 hours all night.  Ever since then a normal night was 3 to 5 hours, with closer to 3 being the most common and 5 being a good night.  It was pretty tough on us, especially once I went back to work for good at 15 weeks.  We tried to appease her with a pacifier if she woke up during the night, but I think the little smarty was on to our game and once she saw Dad she just screamed louder.  So really noone has been sleeping well in our house for the past 8 weeks. 

It was definitely a learning process each night, because we weren't sure what she would do, and we wanted to be realistic about our expectations for her based on where we were coming from, and her age.  We started on Thursday night so that we would have the weekend to rest if we ended up being up all night.  Thursday night she woke up twice, and the longest she cried was 20 minutes.  Friday night she only woke up once, and again cried for about 20 minutes.  Saturday night we decided to start a "dream feed" (feeding her around 10 - 11 while she is asleep) so that when we get the long stretch of time at night it is when we are asleep as well.  She woke up at 5 am on Sunday morning, which is of course early for our taste, so we let her cry for a bit to make sure she was really awake, and decided to get up and feed her at 5:30.  We were hopeful at this point because, although the stretch after the dream feed was only around 5.5 hours, she basically slept from 7:30 until 5, which is a huge improvement!

Sunday night we fed her at 7 and dream fed her at 10.  She woke up at 4, cried off and on for an hour, with the longest stretch being only around 10 minutes.  This was a little tough for us because it meant we didn't sleep for that whole hour, but again, a huge improvement because it was the first straight six hours of sleep I have had in 4 months.  She went back to sleep around 5 and slept until 7.  The biggest reassurement about this to me is that when she woke up at 7 she was happy and played for about 10 minutes in her crib, she wasn't fussy and starving.  Definite progress is being made.

For the rest of that week, she usually woke up once or twice, half-heartedly cried for about 10 minutes, and then went back to sleep.  Just when I was starting to worry that maybe this was going to be the routine for a while, she did it!  We put her to bed on Monday night around 7, Clint gave her a dream feed bottle at 10:30, and when my alarm went off at 5:30 I realized that that was the first time I had woken up the whole night.  It took us 11 nights with very minimal crying, and I know that I actually feel like my old self again.  Yay Clara!

And now, a funny picture to make reading that whole post worth it.

1 comment:

  1. Oh how exciting!! You and Clint will get sleep! What a good baby Clara is. I really need to see her. She's getting so big. She is really beautiful!!! What a perfect little face. Great job on the tough love! I know it wasn't easy.

    ReplyDelete