This has been a long time coming. Gavin’s sleep has been really, really bad for the last few months. For more details, see this post. We have been on the fence about starting sleep training for a while now, but know that the time has come to do it now. There are so many reasons this is important for us:
Number one is for Gavin. He NEEDS restful sleep. His sleep is so interrupted right now, and he is fussy a lot of the day because of it. Our sweet boy has no ability to initiate sleep and is so reliant on us, but he doesn’t want to be rocked to sleep anymore. This leads to so many tears (on both of our ends), and it needs to stop.
Number two is for me. I’ve had a lot of anxiety since Gavin was born, and the lack of sleep is really not helping. It’s causing me so much worry, and I feel like our days just revolve around Gavin’s awake and asleep times.
Number three is for Chris and I’s marriage. Gavin will be five months old on Saturday, and we haven’t slept in the same room since he was born. If we are lucky, we get an hour together each evening before Gavin wakes up and needs to be soothed or before I need to go to bed to at least get a little rest, since I know I will be woken up multiple times in the night.
But above all, we are doing this for our little boy. It is an important and necessary skill for him to learn how to sleep.
I have been following Chrissy at The Peaceful Sleeper since Gavin was born. I have her book, troubleshooting guides, and follow her Instagram diligently to learn as much as I possibly can about baby sleep. Personally, I just didn’t feel like I had the ability to sleep train on my own (with Chris’s help of course), so we decided to hire Chrissy as a sleep consultant for two weeks to help walk us through the process. We start tomorrow, and I am terrified!
The general program we will be following is:
Keeping Gavin’s awake times during the day to about 1.5 hours between naps
Really working on controlling his gas with gas drops, gripe water, and lots of burping
Modified cry-it-out at bedtime, for naps, and for middle of the night wakings that are not due to hunger by setting a timer for 10, 15, 20, 20, and 20 minutes and going in to soothe in between intervals
There are way more details to it, but our goal over the next two weeks is really just to help Gavin learn to initiate sleep on his own and put himself back to sleep when he is woken up prematurely. I am so not looking forward to the crying, but this is something that we really need to do for our family. And who knows – maybe it won’t be as bad as I think it will be?
I plan to document our whole journey with this in hopes to provide encouragement to other parents that are going through the same thing!
Stay tuned……
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