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Friday, April 6, 2012

Sleep training, night 1

We have 2 issues to address:
Sleeping in the crib instead of with us
Sleeping instead of eating all night

It's pretty clear that I am a human pacifier. Last few weeks, she's not eating that much but also WON'T LET ME GO. She's 12 months and almost 2 weeks old and eats like a champ during the daytime. She is physically capable of sleeping and not eating overnight. We just have to help her realize that.

So the plan was to have me nurse her before bed and put her down as always. But for all night wakings, The Hottest Computer Scientist in the Universe would go in and comfort her and put her back to sleep.

10 pm: asleep finally
10:30: awake. Kinda angry that THCSITU went in instead of me, but after a while she calms down for him and goes to sleep.
11:30: cries for under a minute before falling asleep in his arms. However, he has a really hard time lying her down. No clue how long that took - 45 min? Longer?
1:30: this time she is a bit madder but otherwise like previous? Not sure.
3:35: THCSITU tries to comfort the kiddo. 25 min of hysteria. Eventually they come find me in our room, Baby Girl leading her Papi by the hand. He is upset to see her so upset. Which I understand. It was no fun for me to listen to it either.

I don't want her to think she can scream till she gets her way - but since she has an on-the-boob night waking habit, she probably was honestly hungry by that point.

I put her on the boob as we talk about it. I was wrong to try and eliminate all the night wakings at once. She may not NEED to eat at night, but her body sure is accustomed to it. She settled down for THCSITU tonight with very little fuss, until this 4 am feeding. We talked about boob vs. bottle. I advocate that tomorrow we do the same thing, but at any 4am-or-after awakening I will go in instead of him. To feed her and put her to sleep - and leave her sleeping in her crib. We'll see if later in the week or next weekend we can start trying to push that feeding back, substitute a bottle of milk and then after switch to water, or just skip it entirely.

I took her back to her room where THCSITU had put her crib mattress on the floor and put some play mat next to it for him to sleep on. I nursed and rocked and sang to her - and noticed that she popped off before she fell asleep, and rolled back to sleep.

I set her on her mattress, which caused her to reach for the nipple again. But I just took it out of her mouth and she rolled to her side and fell asleep.

Here's hoping her next waking is at 7 - although this room doesn't have a curtain so I don't know if she will sleep once it's light out.

If only I could sleep... this mat is so uncomfortable!!

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