The sleep training has began. We started Friday night, which wasn't too bad. I must say, it is the hardest thing I have to do to my little boy, to allow him to cry and reach for me when I am forced to leave the room so he can sleep. But I know it's the best thing for him in the long run. Here is a breakdown of how our nights (and days) have been...
Day 1 Friday
Aidan was at daycare today, so he got his usual nap from 11:30 to 2:15pm. He always does so well at daycare (they say he is their best napper). They give him his blanket and binky, and they say he goes right to sleep. I wish it was that easy at home. Well, we started him on a bedtime routine. We pushed his bedtime a little later (usually he falls asleep by 8:30, but we pushed it back to 9-9:30 for the first several days). We feed him dinner, let him play for a while, give him a bath, take him to his room to get his jammies on, and let him play quietly in his room until it's time for bed. We usually read him a few stories before bed as well. We lay him down about 9pm, and of course he cried for a couple minutes after we left the room. I could tell he was throwing things out of his crib (later when we went to check on him to see if he was sleeping, I found a binky and a monkey on the floor). The method says that after 3 minutes (on day 1) of crying/calling out, you are supposed to go check on him to reassure him, but after 2 minutes, he stopped. So we left him as is. He was out, it was awesome. He woke up only a couple times during the night (once at 1:27 and again at 5:15). The first time he woke up, he cried for about a minute and was quiet again. The second time, he just cried once, and went back to sleep. He went all night without a binky, which makes me happy cause we are hoping that we will wean from the binky after a few weeks of getting the routine down. We then had to wake him up at 7am, so that he wouldn't oversleep. It was a wonderful first night.
Day 2 Saturday
Starting off with naptime, it was awful. But it got better. Aidan is down to 1 nap a day, and he usually falls asleep after lunch at daycare and stays asleep for a couple hours. We try to follow his daycare schedule since he is there most of the week. We fed him lunch a little early since he was acting hungry. So we tried to lay him down at 11am cause he was winding down. I laid him in his bed at 11:07, let him cry for 3 minutes (which he did), checked on him (he was so upset with me, he just wanted to hug me and let me hold him...makes me so sad), waited for 5 minutes, checked on him again (same reaction, I didn't think we were going to get a nap today), waited 10 minutes...but after about 7-8 minutes of waiting and crying, it became quiet. He tuckered himself out and finally fell asleep about 11:30. He slept for 2 1/2 hours! Not waking up once, that's solid sleep! I was so happy that he got a good nap, I had to wake him up at 2 or he probably would have slept longer. We did the same bedtime routine. We put him to bed about 9:15pm, and he cried again (he seemed scared for us to leave the room, it just breaks my heart). But he only cried for 2 minutes, then he was out and slept all night! I went into his room in the morning around 7:20am to check on him, and he was just laying in bed looking up at the ceiling. I don't know how long he was awake for, but I am glad that he was quiet and wasn't fussing.
Check back in a couple days to see how it continues!
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