On Sleep Training My Baby

This post is not about how I sleep trained Cruze. It's about why we chose to sleep train him. Cruze was a good sleeper from the day he was born. He had his days and nights straight and it looked like things were going to be super easy for us on the sleep front. Fast foward to five weeks old and things had changed, drastically. He started sleeping for 20 minutes at a time, waking up for 20 minutes and round and round we'd go. Night time sleep started to get worst and Phillip and I started to feel it.

Sleep deprivation is no fun. Add in a baby who needs constant attention and you have a breakdown waiting to happen. For us, I'm pretty sure my difficulty to produce milk had so much to do with it. But now we created a new routine of NOT sleeping for hours at a time. For a lot of families this is okay. And more power to them! But for us? It was not okay. Not okay at all. You see, Phillip and I started to miss each other. Every night was spent trying to figure out how to get Cruze to stay asleep. It was spent trying to figure out if he was hungry, tired or colicky. And this? This led to bickering. Between Phillip and I of course. I was lacking sleep, he was lacking sleep and we were still trying to get the hang of the whole baby thing. It was around this time that I decided that we needed to sleep train our son.

I heard about the BabyWise book from a friend so I immediately went out and bought it. At this point I knew nothing about the controversy around it. I didn't know that many people thought it was evil to use this method. I'm glad I didn't know. I'm glad I bought the book and read it before allowing others views to influence mine. It took longer than I expected for it to work (probably because I'm impatient with certain things) but right when I was about to give up something happened. Cruze started sleeping 7 hours at night, then 8, then 9 and then? 11-12 hours a night. Marvelous! Simply marvelous.

It was at that point when things got sooo much easier. I always know what he needs. I no longer had to guess if he was hungry, tired and so on. And the best part? The first (or maybe second) reason why I decided to give it a try in the first place was to make sure that Phillip and I didn't lose that spark. That fire between us that makes us... us. By 8:30 every night my sweet sweet baby is peacefully asleep (except for when he's teething like NOW) and it's just Mommy and Daddy. Husband and Wife. Like old times. I feel like nothing has changed between us except for the increased bond that creating a life together gives you. We act silly, watch our favorite shows, talk about our day... anything we want. And all because baby is happily asleep in the next room. That is why I chose to sleep train my son.

Because picnic/movie nights in our living room just wouldn't be the same any other way...

For everyone who may be wondering, I am not a fan of the cry it out method. A few tears, sure but screaming crying? No way. It's just not my thing. We did what worked for our family. There was a little bit of trial and error but we got it down and we are so happy we did. I also always fed my baby when he was hungry. I know there is some misconception with the method we chose but I would NEVER allow my baby to go hungry. NEVER.