An update from my nap conundrum... I've made it my daily mission to get the little guy on a schedule.
I bought 'Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child' by Weissbluth and 'Solve Your Child Sleep Problems' by Ferber. And like any anxious mother, I jumped right into sleep training without so much as opening a page. Sometimes I wonder if self help books are really intended to be read or just to motivate one to jump off the cliff and give it a try.
Whether you believe in 'crying it out' or not, we are all striving for the same thing - getting the baby to self soothe and go to sleep as easily as possible (for him and our mental stability).
Sleep Training Take 1: I tried the 'crying it out' method first. I thought that Chase's most regular sleep cycle was a nap from 4pm - 6pm. Dangerously close to bed time, but hey, if that's what the little guy digs, I'm game. Well, that was just down right dumb. I let him cry it out for 4 days in a row and thought I would lose my mind. On 2 occasions he cried for 45 minutes, 1 occasion for 30 and 1 he cried for the whole whopping hour before I picked him up. While he 'cried it out', I was in tears tearing through a bag of pretzels staring at the monitor like it was the Superbowl. I realized we were on a dead end path. So I returned to my manuals and read more than the 5 pages on the extinguishing 'cry it out' method. Here's what I learned: Chase was EXHAUSTED by 4pm. He was was really over exhausted and could not settle himself.
Sleep Training Take 2: Despite the fact that it seemed ludicrous to me, the books insist that a baby needs to take his first nap after 1-2 hours of awake time. 1-2 hours? I haven't even gotten through a feeding session, a cup of coffee and half of Good Morning America by then? But clearly waiting until 4pm wasn't working, so let's swing the pendulum the other way and try the early nap method. Miraculously, Chase went down after only 5 minutes of crying! About 2 hours after waking, he was ready for another nap go-around. And low and behold, he was ready for a last nap of the day around 3pm. It doesn't even require that much effort... I watch for the fussiness and eye glassiness, put him in the sleep sack, rock and read a few pages, sing him the A, B, C song (hey, I want the little guy to learn something during the brief awake time) and lay him down. His internal alarm clock has him up 45 minutes later, but 45 minutes is better than nothing! Between feeding and nap time, it feels like we only have 1 hour increments to leave the house, but like anything else, this will change too.
Sleep Training Take 3: Now that Chase is a nap pro (ok, I exaggerate here), he wants to go to bed much earlier! We're backing up from 8pm to 7:30pm for the feeding. Now if only I could cook and eat before this! More to follow....
Still only half way through Weissbluth's book and haven't cracked a page in Ferber's, but we're in a much better place than a month a go!
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