Sleep…. what sleep?

You must all have noticed that I haven’t been posting in the past few weeks. The lack of commitment on this front has been instigated by new developments with our little girl. It has always been very difficult to get our little one to sleep. From the get go, some of you may have read the bouncing theatrics we had to accomplish in order to prevent her from crying. We were able to get away from that but had to replace it with a bum tap. Eventually, this bum tap wasn’t enough so we incorporated a white noise to help her not get distracted with ambient noise. Furthermore, we eventually added a full body wrap so that she wouldn’t be able to get her soother out. At one point, all of this wasn’t enough, as she would get distracted by light fixtures, picture frames, windows and the likes. Now we had to cover her so she wouldn’t get visual distractions. To complicate all matters, in the past 2-3 weeks, all of these maneuvers still weren’t able to put her to sleep and the bed time routine lasted anywhere from 2 hours and 30 minutes to 4 hours of screaming. After enduring 2-3 weeks of her fighting off sleep, and waking up 2-3 times throughout the night… we finally decided it had to stop. There had to be a remedy to our craziness. (On the plus side, I’ve gotten really good at trapping flailing arms and legs while tapping a bum!)

After doing a bit of research we reviewed a few methods to strengthen sleep behaviors and we decided to implement the famous Ferber method… This method indicates that you must first establish a bedtime routine, ensure your babies’ needs are met and put your baby awake in their crib. If your baby is like ours, they will cry and freak out. The concept is to come back at established time intervals to soothe your baby and ensure everything is OK. Once you’ve shown y our presence, ensured everything is safe, you must simply leave the room to wait till the next interval. Apparently most babies show drastic changes within a few days since they learn that the crib is for sleep while also learning to soothe themselves.

Tonight is the first night of implementation. Boy oh boy is it tremendously hard to listen to your baby cry. While ensuring she was safe and at all moments staring at the little 2 by 2 inch camera display, hoping that she would calm herself, it was most assuredly one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. I don’t know why this was so much harder than spending hours with her in our arms trying to soothe her while she is in hysterics. The fact that I’m doing nothing but going to see her every x amount of minutes makes me feel like a pretty lousy dad. I kept thinking to myself, should I stop this and simply stick it out with the crying in our arms method… surely that must be at the end of its phase.

I was able to stick it out. Luckily after a while, her cries weren’t so intense, her movements slower and her eyes much more sleepy. It ended up taking 2 hours and 8 minutes! Technically, even though harder on me, she actually spent less time crying than if I would have tried soothing her in my arms. Comparing online to other parent’s first attempt, it seems a lot of them get success after 30 minutes but surprisingly enough 2 hours and 8 minutes is kind of a win for us! We’ll stick it out and also incorporate this method in her naps to hopefully see some change! What may increase the difficulty of implementing such a drastic change in her sleeping habits will be the fact that we’ll be traveling during Christmas.

Santa… if you’re gonna get me something this year, I would like a baby that can self soothe!!! 🙂
Thanks for reading and I wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New year to all! 🙂