Cryin it out: My New Best Friend

Well, it worked. Who woulda thunk it. Last night (Night #3), Will and Oliver slept from 7:15 pm until 7:00 am – WITHOUT WAKING ONCE. Simply amazing. This evening, there was a moment that I forgot we had kids sleeping in the other room (does that make me a bad mom?). I will say that, in addition to improving their quality of sleep, it has also been, oddly enough, incredibly liberating. I don’t walk around in the evenings filled with the fear that they might wake up, and how, in heaven’s name are we going to get them back to sleep again. Even if they do wake up, they are learning how to get themselves back to sleep on their own. Another note is that naps are still not going swimmingly well, however, that was inline with our expectations, as daytime sleep apparently takes longer to master. They are continuing to improve on that front as well, though, which does give us hope. They slept for an hour stretch during two naps today, which we were incredibly happy with.

I’m still not getting a crazy amount of sleep, as I stay up to do the dream feed, which lasts until 11:20, and then I do a load of laundry and get everything set up for the morning. And being the night owl that I am, I proceed to then read, write or catch up on my endless Twitter articles. Finally pass out around 1:30 or so. Subconsciously, I think I’m still waiting for them to wake up, so I can take care of them before Aaron’s shift, which would usually start between 2:30-3:30. Next week, I think we will begin weaning them from their dream feed, though, and then hopefully I will really start getting some good sleep. Over a year of not sleeping through the night – I don’t remember what it feels like to have a brain that functions! Soon, Lisa, soon.

More to come.

Cryin it out: Night #2

Has it really only been 24 hours?  Uff-duh.  What a day.  After the hour and a half of crying last night, followed by a successful dream feed, they did not wake up until 3:15!  From here, they proceeded to cry on and off for about an hour and twenty minutes, but they did go back to sleep.  Then Will slept until 6:30, and we had to WAKE UP Oliver at 7. 

We made the decision to also do naps at the same time – wham bam, thank you ma’am.  #1, in order for them to go to sleep by themselves and #2, to try to get them to sleep longer and extend their naps, so we can start consolidating. While we thought about doing them at a different time, now that we are in it, I’m sooo glad that we did, because they got to practice all day long.  So when it came to this evening, they were pros!  Oliver cried for three minutes and was asleep in five.  Will took about a half hour to fall asleep, but didn’t really cry at all.  On Night 2!!  I’m wondering if this might be a fluke??  Perhaps they were so darn exhausted from crying all day that they were like, fine, I’ll go to sleep already!

When I’m able to sit back and think about it,  it’s actually a pretty amazing experience. We get to watch our kids learn the skill of how to fall asleep by themselves.  Watch how they learn to soothe themselves.  You can almost see it go through their heads as they are learning. Makes the crying a bit more tolerable.  That, and I think I would  poke my eyeballs out with burning bamboo sticks if we were to sabotage the work that we’ve done and have to start over. Hearing your baby(s) cry for so long really is one of the most brutal, terrible experiences. 

Here’s how this evening went down:

6:42 pm – Oliver is pissed:

6:45 – Oliver quiets and stares into our souls once again.

6:48 – Oliver sleeps.

6:42 – Will is chillin’.  Whatever mom and dad – fine, you left, no big whoop. I can do this by myself.

7:00 – Will is mad that we changed his sheets as he tries to find the place he was licking last night.

7:12 – Will sleeps.

PS: For those parents out there, the book that our doula recommended to use is The Sleepeasy Solution. This is the book we are going by, and it was a pretty easy read (of utmost importance when you have no time and no mental capacity due to sleep deprivation).  As an fyi – this also deals with sleep issues up until they are five, I believe. It’s a shot of Ferber, with a teaspoon of Weisbluth, combined with a quart of making parents feel better about the crying. 

Cryin it out

Well, the time has come.  The time to cry it out.  Up until now, we’ve gone through a roller coaster of sleep.  At first, even though we were up at all hours, they were pretty easy to get back to sleep.  Then, even when they ‘woke up to the world’, they were still pretty good sleepers, and by 3 1/2 months they were sleeping 7pm to 7am with a dream feed at 11.  They would still wake up from time to time needing their pacifiers, but for the most part, they were ok.  Fast forward to today (five months). They are waking each other up, they need to be rocked to sleep, Will is now waking up from his naps after 30 minutes, they are waking up many, many times a night and are increasingly difficult to get back to sleep.   They are clearly overtired, because they’re waking up so often and getting ‘junk sleep’.  If one is asleep, the other is up. In short, it’s been very, very exhausting.  And finally, Aaron and I got to our wits end.  Enter: cry it out. Or “Ferberizing” for those of you who watch Modern Family.

The big question: to separate or not to separate.  Despite the fact that we have white noise in between their cribs, they do tend to wake each other up.  Not consistently, and it depends on where in the sleep cycle they are, but they do, so initially we were going to separate them for sleep training, and then put them back together.  Ultimately, however, since they will be sharing a room until they’re quite a bit older, we decided that we wanted them to get used to each other's crying in hopes they will learn to sleep through it. We read that it will take longer to train them, but I am inspired by other moms in my PEPs group who have been successful.

So we are here. February 8th, 2010 (pronounced twenty ten, btw).  We did their normal bedtime routine, albeit a bit earlier than usual (bath, bottle, book with dad, swaddle, put down).  With our monitoring station set-up (as seen below), we were ready to go.

Here is what ensued:

6:33 – both go down – both crying and slightly confused.

6:39 – I go in and let them know that we haven’t gone to Brazil and encourage them that they can, in fact, fall asleep on their own.

6:46 – Oliver stops crying.

6:52 – Will stops crying (is it too good to be true? Yes. Yes, it is.).

6:53 – 6:54 – Oliver cries, causing Will to cry.

6:53 – 7:04 – Will cries, causing Oliver to cry.

6:58 – 7:14 – Oliver is possessed by a demon. Will is whimpering while trying to lick the side of his bed (whatever works to soothe you, my dear).

7:14 – I go in and reassure them, causing Oliver’s demon to turn into The Devil (as in, the one and only, crème de la crème, Dark Angel, Oh Fallen One).  Will is still whimpering.  I then start crying. 

7:15 – 7:31 – Oliver screams, and just before I’m about to go in again, he finds, and is mesmerized by, the green light on the camera at the end of his crib causing him to look directly into it.  He proceeds to stare into my soul.

7:22 – 7:37 – Will openly received the demon that was in Oliver and SCREAMS bloody murder.  He’s doing the ugly cry now (I feel bad that he’s swaddled and can’t hide his face in his hands – no one wants witnesses for the ugly cry).  This causes Oliver to start crying again.

We are officially an hour in.

7:37 – I sneak in to Will’s crib to reassure him that we are still here and he WILL get through this (he didn’t think it was funny). 

7:38 – 7:42 – Will cries while trying to find the place that he was licking before.

7:43 – 7:45 – Will cries more, causing Oliver to look over at him in disgust. Oliver then goes back to shaking his head back and forth trying to find a comfortable position.

I find a corner and start rocking back and forth. 

7:47 – 7:49 – Will cries AGAIN!! Oliver looks SUPER annoyed.  Then goes back to shaking his head. 

7:51 – Will is finally asleep.

7:58 – With Will asleep, Oliver is finally able to fall asleep and stop staring at us.

One hour and 28 minutes for the beginning of night one, and every minute was purdy darn bad. On a brighter note, I was able to successfully give them their dream feed (and change Oliver’s diaper – he’s a big pee-er) and get them back to bed with no waking, so we shall see what the night wakings bring. I hope not another hour and a half of crying.  All the books say that they will be happy to see us in the morning, but I’m kind of doubtful.  Oliver is shaping up to be as stubborn as me, which might not bode well in the grudge department. We shall see.  And tomorrow we get to also start training their naps too.  This week is tops.

The Dream Feeds

Omg. I’m sweating. It’s 11:30 pm and I’m sweating. Is it normal to be this terrified of your children?

Ok – I need to set the scene and provide some background info: Piece #1: So – I do the dream feed every night with the boys. (Dream feed is where I feed them when they are still asleep in hopes that they will sleep longer through the night.) I feed Oliver at 10:40 and William at 11:00. It’s the only feeding where we don’t feed them together (no laughing at the mess, the sagginess, or the everlasting sausage arms). Piece #2: While I’m waiting for the dream feed time to come, I get out my ‘pregnancy bag’, as pictured below to send to a friend. I innocently put it on top of a box of diapers in our bedroom, not thinking twice about it. Piece #3: our kids are fairly easily woken up, and they are fairly difficult to put down in the evening, so this time of night is always fraught with a bit of heart pitter patter, wondering if they will actually sleep through the feeding and that I will actually be able to put them down while still sleeping.

Alright, it’s time. I go get our young man Mr. Oliver and bring him back to bed for some noms. Things are going swimmingly, UNTIL, the third child Turtle decided to stretch her paws and get out of bed. Where does she go? Straight for the pregnancy bag of course. Apologies for bad picture quality – they were all taken with my phone with only lamp light.

I’m sitting here with Oliver, who is sleeping and eating, and I see her jump up and poke her nose in the bag. Things go slo-mo. I receive a vision of Turtle jumping in the bag, knocking it over onto the ground with a bang, leaving me to deal with a crying, hungry, angry baby. What do I do?? Deep breaths Lisa; you can do this. So, I take the bottle out of Oliver’s mouth, scoop him up, get out of bed, go over and unhook Turtle’s head, which had managed to get through the handles, grab the bag and go quietly set the bag down in the bathroom and shut the door. I scurry back to bed, lay Oliver back down and stick the bottle back in and look down (heart pounding). Awake! I quickly put my hands over his eyes, so he just sees darkness. Minutes go by, and I peek under my hand. Phew – he’s back asleep. Deep breath – nice save. Then Turtle decides THIS is the time that she wants to meet Oliver (she basically ignores and avoids them). She jumps on the bed and starts moseying her way over. Omg. Omg. Turtle!! Now?? Now you want to check him out??

She gets on the pillow that I’m feeding him on and starts kneading the pillow, looks at him, looks at me, then rips out a loud MEOW. You bitch!

Oliver stirs. I put my hand back over his eyes and give Turtle a dirty look (cuz she could totally get it). He does manage to go back to sleep. Thank God! Finally Turtle settles in next to the O-man. I’m able to finish feeding him, no problems. I put him back in his crib… and we are SAFE.

Child #2. I can still hear my heart in my ears when I pick up Sir William for his feeding. Surely this will go better. I settle him in and put a plug in it. He starts sucking, and immediately gets a ton of air. So we go from this:

To this:

Ok – think Lisa. I pull out the bottle and quickly switch bottle tops – he’s in between nipple sizes, so I’m never quite sure which one he’s going to use. Put the bottle back in his mouth, and put my hand over his eyes, so he just sees dark (inspired by how well it worked with Oliver just moments before). He starts sputtering and choking – crap, ok, the nipple is too big. Pull out the bottle, and switch tops again, back to the original size. Put the bottle back in his mouth – sucks air. Typically I don’t burp during the dream feed, but this was getting out of hand. I could hear the air going all the way down to his stomach. I pull out the bottle, and burp him, swaddle and all on my shoulder. BURP. Let’s try this again. Put bottle back in mouth. Suck, suck, AIR. Suck, suck, AIR. I try different positions, no luck. At this point, he’s SMILING at me, he’s so awake. I’m panicked. Let’s try again. Suck, suck, AIR. Dammit!! Now he just starts playing with the nipple in his mouth, and formula is going everywhere. Clearly not hungry. He ate a whopping 2.5 ounces (out of 7). So, I make the executive decision that he’s done. I pick up his little awake body up and bring him back to his room, where I proceed to rock him to sleep (shhh don’t tell). Finally, I’m able to put him down (almost done Lisa, you can see the finish line). Well, they still sleep in their rockets for their reflux, and I had to velcro him in. I woke him up. NOOOOOO (sweating profusely at this point). So I un-velcro (not quiet, btw), pick him up and rock him back to sleep again. I finally put him down and velcro him in, and he stays asleep.

And there you have an evening of the dream feeds.