I thought I had it together when it came to sleep training my baby. When he was four months old, he was sleeping six to seven hours in a row. Everyone was saying, “wow that’s great”. About two months ago, he was sleeping eight to ten hours which is awesome right? Well as he got older, the sleeping had changed and when he got sick, it all went to hell.
At this current time, my son is ten months old and will only fall asleep if you put your hand on his chest and whisper to him. I thought that this was easy but now realize that he can’t soothe himself and at 2:30am it can be brutal to try and soothe him every 10 minutes for over an hour period. So now, my husband and I are trying fresh and seeing if we can train our little boy to self soothe and fall asleep on his own. We have tried to let him “cry it out” for the past two nights. It is devastating to hear your little one cry so hard. He’s pissed off, sad and confused and all I want to do is hold him and comfort him with my touch. Last night he cried for almost 90 minutes before he fell asleep and then at 11:30pm he cried for 20 minutes and then at 2:30am he screamed for almost an hour. The one thing I think I should have done last night was to see if he had a soiled diaper. Maybe he was just letting me know that he needed to be changed before he could settled down again (my son is a pretty good eater and he always eats a big dinner before bed). I think tonight I’m gonna check his diaper if he wakes up at 2:00am again.
I feel like I have been sleep training my boy for the past six months. Every couple of months he changes and things have to be modified and we need to adapt to his change.
Isn’t parenting grand!