Disclaimer:
- I’m not a baby whisperer - I’m actually far from it. I’m more of a hacker, as is the title of this blog. So please don’t use this article as your sleep training bible!
- I initially started writing this post in January and never finished it. Thank you Alexis for nudging me for this one!
Newborns cry… wanting something. Sometimes they know what they want, but most of the time they don’t know what they want, and neither do we know what they want. But overall, for young babies, the reasons are simply:
- need for food
- wet diaper
- tired
ps. I learned these from our nanny, who actually is the baby whisperer.
In the early days of our baby’s life, we woke up every 2 hours, sometimes even every hour (on some bad nights) to feed the baby. It was extremely exhausting and frankly terrible. Fortunately, those days didn’t last that long. After about 6 weeks, my husband (who was the main person getting up at night since he’s the light sleeper) made the executive decision that we were going to sleep train the baby. We started the training at 8 weeks, and it “finished” at around 12 weeks. We were extremely satisfied with the results and would recommend to anyone.
Honestly, the more I google searched “sleep training” the more horrible it sounds. There are all these moms who swear they would never let their babies “cry it out” (and there’s even an acronym for it, CIO). They say it’s too cruel, can’t be done until 6mo+, etc. I was very hesitant after reading all these contradictory opinions. I wanted to be a good mom and not abuse my baby! However, since my husband was the one getting up all the time to feed, I followed his decision and embraced the training agenda.
We followed this book called Twelve Hours' Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old, it was recommended by a coworker of my husband. We didn’t want to buy it, so just borrowed an audiobook version from the library and listened to it together on one of the mini-road trips we took during our parental leave. This title sounds insane (12 hours??), and we’ve almost never got 12 hours of sleep non-stop, but we are generally pretty close, at around 11 hours or so after a few months.
To summarize the main steps of this training method:
0. Pick a “schedule”
This is not so important down the road, but it’s a good thing to do initially so you have a schedule to stick to. Basically you want to see if you want to start your day at 7AM or 8AM. Then add 4 hours increments. So if you had picked 8AM, then it’s 8AM, 12PM, 4PM, 8PM, 12AM, and 4AM. These will be your feeding times.
1. Get your baby to a “schedule”
This step took us about 2 or 3 days. After picking the original schedule, we just start feeding the baby on the clock. The book stated some tricks like “if the baby is hungry but there’s 2 hours left, then just delay it by 30 mins then feed the baby, don’t let him/her cry for a complete 2 hours” kind of detail. But the main concept is that you try little stretches here and there to get the baby used to the 4 hour feeding rhythm and not the 2 hours or even 1 hour period.
This was not very easy for us. The entire family (or at least all the caretakers) has to be onboard with the plan, and not freak out when the baby cries. This training period happened to be when we were on a trip to Lake Tahoe with my MIL. She was very nurturing and generally not very ok with letting the baby cry for more than 10 seconds. My husband got into a fight with his mom about how she fed him 30 mins earlier than scheduled, while I pretended to be looking at the beautiful lake scenery.
This phase eventually passed, and we successfully got the baby to want to eat every 4 hours, with a +-5mins error bar. We were thrilled that it happened so fast!
2. Slowly remove the middle-of-night feeding
This step took us a long time! The book suggested comforting the baby, reducing the amount of milk fed in the 4AM feeding. However, it’s not a one-step process and it’s not like you can just let your baby cry all night for hunger! There’s a lot of “should we just give up and give a full feeding in exchange for 4 hours? Or give a small amount and hope it will be ok?” struggle. Getting up at 4AM isn’t fun, but getting up again at 4:30 after a small feed is even worse! My husband took most of these feeds and he was quite frustrated for a few weeks that he thought it didn’t work.
3. Voila! Enjoy!
It didn’t really happen until pretty much the week that we went back to work, when the baby was just over 12 weeks old. We woke up hearing a cry realizing it was bright out. We thought we just got lucky one night and it would regress back, but it didn’t. I guess the baby realized that he could sleep longer at night and that felt better than getting up and crying.
And at this point, all I can say about this is: Sleep training is worth it, really! You’ll regret why you didn’t start this earlier. Sleep is very important for the parents too, and it really makes us happier and more patient during our days, both for work and for taking care of the baby. I think it’s great for the baby too. I don’t know if we just got lucky with a very calm and mellow baby, but I think he also benefits from a full night of sleep and is happier during the day. There are numerous mornings that he was already awake, but was quietly playing in his crib, and I walk into his room and saw him looking up at me with a big smile. It’s the best thing ever.
Sleeping isn’t done yet!
I wrote this blog post initially, thinking we are done with sleep training. And then there’s little regressions here and there, waking up in the middle of night every now and then. We just realized it’s always going to be an on-going thing in our lives. Sometimes he had bad dreams and really needed to be woken up (he was still half sleeping while crying) to calm down, sometimes it’s the diaper, etc. He is a very very easy baby, though - he rarely ever needed to be rocked to sleep, most of the time we just put him down in his crib, say good night, put his favorite lion pacifier in his mouth, and he would happily go quiet and fall asleep.
We’re still not textbook-awesome about sleep, though. The baby now, at 10 months, goes to bed around 8:30PM and wakes up around 7AM, which counts to 10.5 hours. We hope to get to 12 hours, but would be ok at 11 hours, which is what I heard the book Why We Sleep suggested. The 8:30PM bed time is on the later side, too. The baby would try very hard to show that he’s not interested in go to sleep yet, and while my husband would say “ok just let him play a bit more”, I usually play the strict parent and insist that we at least try to put him in the crib to give him a chance to sleep. It sometimes works - we just need some patience with the back and forth. I view it as operational tasks at work like checking if your deploy has gone through, and you just have to keep trying at the build, and deploy, until it’s done.