Monday, June 02, 2008

Ferberizing

OK, tonight we are beginning the ferberizing process. For those of you who aren't familiar with this it's a sleep training method developed by Dr. Richard Ferber. The basis premise is that babies who are rocked to sleep don't know how to put themselves to sleep. So when they wake up in the middle of the night, which is totally normal since even adults wake up, they don't know how to go back to sleep without being rocked - hence the crying in the middle of the night.

So you put baby to bed while he or she is awake, you say goodnight and give kisses and then you leave the room. Usually the baby will start crying. You start off by going in to reassure baby that you're still here after 3 minutes, and if he's still crying you go back in after waiting 5 minutes, and then you wait 10 minutes. On the first night you go in every 10 minutes until he falls asleep. You do the same thing if/when he wakes up in the middle of the night. The second night you start by waiting 5 minutes, then 10 minutes, then 12 for the rest of the night. And it gets a little longer each night. Most people I've found online say the first two nights are bad but then there's a drastic improvement on nights 3 or 4.

Night 1:
- 8:12, put Sam in his crib. He cried, of course.
- 8:15, I went in to check on him, still crying.
- 8:21, he was still crying and looking at me like I clearly must have lost my mind.
- 8:26, checked in on him, couldn't go right to 10 minutes yet. He was crying and called me a jerk in baby language.
- 8:37, checked in, still crying.
- 8:46 Sam stopped crying!
- 9:01 he's still sleeping!
-11:08, he's up and it's definitely a little bit harder to listen to my guy be sad now.
- 11:15, my little man is yelling and I totally feel bad now, I think it's harder now that I'm on my own and the hubby is asleep. Hopefully he'll go to sleep fairly quickly like he did earlier tonight.
- 11:23, up and yelling, though not as loud as before.
- 11:31, some whimpering.
- 11:43, some more whimpering.
- 12:00, silence...took a little longer this time.
- 3:50, he's up! He hasn't slept 4 hours in a row in 3 weeks. This is already improvement. Oh yeah, and I haven't slept 4 hours in weeks so I feel like a million bucks.
- 3:53, still up and crying.
- 4:00, still up and crying.
- 4:11, some whimpering so I can't go in.
- 4:13 crying.
- 4:15, sleeeeeeeping. But there is that stupid "circle of death" of creaky wood right in front is his door inside his room so I was trapped there. You should see the acrobatics I did in order to escape. Impressive. Only took 25 minutes this time and much less crying, more whimpering.
- 7am awake time!

Here is the brief: It took 30 minutes when he went to sleep, 50 minutes the first time he woke up, and 25 minutes the second time he woke up. The fact that he was only up twice was a small miracle in itself.

Dr. Ferber is getting a batch of cookies from me. We'll see how night #2 goes.

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