Sleep at Leah's House

Hi! First off, let me apologize for being completely MIA the past two weeks. We are re-doing our basement because of the flood damage a few weekends ago. In the middle of that, we decided to go ahead and re-do the bathroom, too. Go figure! I have been painting like a mad woman each evening after putting the boys to bed. And there, is where this post is heading - sleep!

The first time we covered this topic, my son Samuel was 15 months old and I was 4 months pregnant with my son Joel. You can read my post here. I actually had to go back and read what I wrote to see if I still agreed with it! Now that I've sleep-trained two boys, I think I still agree with most of what I said.

Like Christina, I have two different sleepers. Although I didn't do any sleep training with Samuel in the beginning, he was a good eater/sleeper and worked himself into a pretty good routine that lasted for about 8 months. We endured about 4 months of sleep problems before we finally "Cried It Out" at 13 months old. After three days he was napping twice a day and sleeping 13 hours at night without any crying. He is just a good sleeper.

Enter Joel. Oh, Joel. I think he pretty much ate, slept in my arms/next to me, or cried for the first 4 months of his life. He is not a natural born sleeper. He also had a lot working against him. We moved when he was 2 1/2 months old and we didn't have a crib for him for another month, so he was sleeping in bed with me. I took a bad sleeper and really did him in. He enjoyed sleeping at night with me because he nursed the ENTIRE time. No joke. I, on the other hand, was going completely insane because I was getting NO sleep. Now, I am a super-duper pro-breastfeeding person. BUT, I am definitely not one of those people who thinks co-sleeping and nursing all night long is convenient because I HATE nursing for a long time. I can't explain it, but it makes my skin crawl! :) (Are all my La Leche League friends dying right now?). We were in a bind, though, and he was stuck in bed with us for that month.

We finally got the boys room set up and we were now faced with a double task: 1) Put Samuel to bed in his Big Boy Bed (a twin mattress on the floor with a bed rail) and 2) Put Joel to bed in his crib. Here's how we tackled both.

1) Putting a 23 month old in a Big Boy Bed. This is the easy one. We had the bed set up in his room and the crib. We said he was going to start sleeping in his Big Boy Bed. We laid him down for naps and betime and he went to sleep and that was it. Two times he asked to sleep in his crib and we let him. But then he was back in the Big Boy Bed. He stays in it for naps and all through the night. When he gets up in the morning, he comes out of his room and comes into our room to get me up. I don't have any real advice here except to say - just try it, you may be surprised. I was so nervous after hearing other people, but it was no big deal for us.

2) Switching Joel from co-sleeping to independent sleeping. Ugh. I'll be honest, this was a battle. At four months, I talked it over with my pediatrician and she gave me the green light to Cry It Out with Joel. She assured me that he was physiologically able to make it 11-12 hours at night without eating. But she also warned me that we had a real fight on our hands because Joel is just not a good sleeper. We said, though, that we were going to fight this battle one way or another and it was better to do it now than to let him establish 6-8-10-12 months of bad sleep habits. I started working on his nighttime sleep, and waited to work on naps until he had gotten nighttime sleep down. The first night he cried for over two hours and I finally broke down and went and got him. I couldn't take it. I called the doctor the next day and assured her that this wasn't going to work. She assured me it would. She told me to take the night off and try again the following night. I did that and he cried for 30 minutes, slept for an hour, cried for 20 minutes, slept for 3 hours, I fed him, he cried for 10 minutes and then slept for 4 hours. I fed him again and he slept for another 2 hours. The next morning I said to Ed, I think I'm supposed to make him go all night long without feeding him. So we did that. He went down at 7:45, cried for 45 minutes, slept 5 hours, cried for 15 minutes, and then slept until 6 am. I fed him and he slept another 2 hours. We've battled back and forth since then for bedtime. He now goes down to sleep at 6:15/6:30 and sleeps until 5:30/6:00. He cries for 20 minutes max about 4 nights a week. At 7 months he is still working on napping consistently. I lay him down at 9:30am and 2:30pm. Sometimes he goes to sleep, sometimes it takes 10-20 minutes of crying and sometimes he cries for a full hour before I go and get him (1 hour is my max for naptimes). I am a strong believer now, though, in consistent sleep and so I continue to try to get him to nap each day. I know that he needs the sleep.

I agree with everything Christina wrote and with Meagan's comment. Children need sleep. Just because your child "doesn't nap" during the day doesn't mean that s/he doesn't need sleep. It means they need help learning how to sleep on their own. And an early bedtime is such a great thing. Yikes! I just realized how long this post is - sorry!

For those of you who just scrolled to the bottom, here's my boys' sleep schedules in a nutshell:

6:30pm - Joel (7 months old) to bed
7:30pm - Samuel (2 years old) to bed
6:00am - Joel wakes, eats, and goes back to bed
6:45am-ish - Samuel wakes
7:30am-ish - Joel wakes
9:30am to 11:30am - Joel naps
1:00pm to 3:30pm (often later!) - Samuel naps
2:30pm to 3:30pm - Joel naps (we're working on this one right now - should be longer)

Last thing, I swear. My boys share a room. I put Joel to bed first at night so he can cry if he needs to. Then I come in and put Samuel in his bed. If Joel cries in the night, I let him. I also come in and nurse Joel in their room in the morning. Samuel sleeps through it. We are working on room sharing during naps. But it can be done - your children can share a bedroom. Okay, that's it, I swear!