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I haven’t updated on the Owl Sleep Situation in quite a long while, and there’s a reason for that.
I have no idea what the hell is going on.
If he were sleeping badly I could say “his sleep still sucks!”
If he were sleeping wonderfully I could say “his sleep is amazing!”
But it’s so random, so unpredictable, that I honestly don’t know what to tell you.
The GO the F*** To Sleep program works – I’ll give it that. The day before Owl started daycare he slept through the night. But then daycare messed it up. Once we were convinced that he wasn’t starving to death, we decided to reinstitute the program. But Owl kept getting sick.
It basically has been yo-yoing like this:
We start getting Owl to sleep without the breast at night
He starts sleeping for longer stretches.
He gets sick.
He coughs himself awake every 20 minutes.
We get desperate and start letting him nurse himself to sleep.
And then it starts all over again.
After the croup incident we decided to kick it up a notch by actually night weaning him. We tried the Dr. Jay Gordon method, which I discovered through the Leaky Boob.
It is very much like my No Cry Sleep Solution method, which is very like Pug Mama’s Go The F*** To Sleep method. But just as Pug Mama’s method was No Cry kicked up a notch, the Jay Gordon method is kicked up another notch, because he has a TIMELINE.
I didn’t blog about it because I had no time for blogging because I hated my life.
But it totally worked. We were tired, but even by the third and fourth night there were huge improvements seen. It helped that Owl is an old hand by now at being refused booba at night. Once he catches on that we’re serious again he goes right to sleep.
In fact, on night 5 he slept through the night. We were like “THIS IS AMAZING.”
Then guess what happened?
GO ON, GUESS.
Right. HE GOT SICK. The next night, night 6, he coughed himself awake CONSTANTLY and while he would go to sleep if one of us sung to him from the gliding rocker, he would immediately start to cry when that same parent left the room no matter how deeply asleep he appeared to be when we tiptoed out.
PH wanted to give in. I refused. I ended up falling asleep ON THE FLOOR next to the crib and waking up very, very stiff two hours later.
The next night, night 7, was worse, if anything. I fell asleep on the floor next to the crib again. PH dubbed me insane, said there was no point in sleep training a sick baby, and I reluctantly agreed with him.
Owl had found his way back onto my boob.
When he got better we tried to re-implement the criteria, but we couldn’t quite make it through the night. At around 3 or 4 am, we’d let him come to bed with us. After all, we said to each other, Dr. Gordon says to pick a 6-7 hour stretch through the night. Instead of picking 11-6, maybe we were just going to do 9-4.
And that’s sort of how it stayed. On good nights, Owl sleeps until 3 or 4 in the morning, and then PH brings him to bed with me. On bad nights, he wakes up multiple times and we sing him to sleep, USUALLY without booba.
The first time PH said “It’s time to go to sleep, Owl”, and Owl immediately stopped crying and lay down, he said it was like a miracle. That’s what he does, now, because when he hears those words he knows it’s serious.
But I really wish we could get past that 3 am stretch, because it would sure be nice to wake up some morning without a baby jumping on my head or trying to tie knots in my nipples.
And I’m sure PH would appreciate NOT getting kicked out of bed at 3 in the morning every day.
So we need to crack down and finish the night weaning some time soon.
Unfortunately, now we’ve also lost the help of the seahorse, but that’s another story…
