Screw Sleep Training

As you can tell from every other post: I like to have a plan. I like to feel like I am prepared. I can alter the course once it’s in motion, but I like to have that initial blueprint. While I was pregnant, I was terrified to have a baby. I didn’t know the first thing about being a mom. I had a dream pregnancy and would have liked to have been pregnant for 9 more months, because I knew how to take care of her in there. I just drank a lot of water, tried not to eat too much pizza and ice cream, and went to bed early. Easy. To try and appease my mind craving the preparation, I decided to read a highly recommended book Baby Wise.

I read it intensely, made my own Cliff’s Notes version so I could regurgitate everything to Josh (not a chance he was going to read it) and felt as if I now understood everything I needed to know in the first few months of having a baby. I felt a small sense of preparedness. For any of you that have read this, you know there is a big section on sleep training and how to get your baby to go down without relying on being rocked or nursed to sleep by the mother. It made great sense to me when I read it and I had plans to execute it to perfection so that I would have a perfectly trained baby by the time I was to go back to work.

And then Kallie was born.

She was so sweet and I hungered to hold her and be with her when she was down. My favorite thing to do every night (and every few hours) was to rock her to sleep. There is nothing sweeter than a sleeping baby. After about a month, I was ready to start this so called “cry it out” method. I figured I’d start while Josh was out golfing because he couldn’t stand the thought of her crying at all. I laid her down in her crib, swaddled with precision, and had the soothing sound of rain coming out of her noise machine. I turned on her monitor, walked out, and shut the door. And that’s when it all went downhill. Kallie began to cry. And cry. And cry. After what felt like an entire one of Josh’s golf rounds, I looked at the clock. It had been 3 minutes. I waited 2 more and couldn’t stand it anymore. I ran in, swooped her up, and we rocked until she was fast asleep.

While on maternity leave, my mind would become blurred to this experience and I tried 1 or 2 more times, but to no avail. Once she was asleep, she did a great job at staying asleep until she needed to be fed. She consistently started sleeping through the night at about 5 months (with a few sleep regressions mixed in there) so I didn’t feel like I was doing her a total coddling disservice.

 Once I went back to work, there wasn’t a chance I was going to try it again. She is 14 months now and I still proudly can say that I rock her to sleep every night. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know that at some point I will have to let her learn how to fall asleep on her own and that sleep training enthusiasts are cringing, but right now that is our time together. Because I am not with her all day, that is a precious time for me to be able to hold her and nurture her. I don’t necessarily even do it for her anymore; I do it for me. She’s so active and busy now that this is the time where she still feels like my baby and not the grown up she seems to be being lately. I look forward to our snuggle time every night where I can just kiss her chubby little cheeks and we can giggle and then she can sweetly fall asleep.

I know that sleep training can be a great thing and works really well for some people. For me, I need my snuggle time. And for that – screw sleep training.

 

Did anyone else have a hard time with sleep training? Does anyone have any good stories with sleep training to encourage the ones like me who could cut it?