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.