Back to Bed (Sleep Training at 13 Months)

I’ll start with the exciting news: Noah has been sleeping in his own bed and sleeping through most nights for over 2 weeks now.  We have our bed back to ourselves, aren’t constantly woken up by a wiggly worm, we all (including that little worm) sleep much better, and Tony and I are proud of ourselves for making this all happen with a lot less drama, sleep deprivation, and fighting than expected. Here’s the full story. 

In the very beginning, Noah used to sleep in his own crib or pack n play in our room. When he woke up to eat, I got up, sat down with him in his room to nurse him, and laid him back down in his bed. Sure, I had to get up quite a bit, but that was okay, I was on Noah’s schedule anyway, still on maternity leave, and I’d make up for the lack of sleep by taking afternoon naps. Then at about 3 months, after his first week of daycare (we had been warned this was likely to happen), Noah got sick with a cold and the only way he would sleep okay was in bed with us. The cold didn’t last long, but Noah stayed in bed with us at night. 

We still continued to put him to sleep in his room; he’d fall asleep nursing at first, later with a bottle in his crib until he was about 10 months old. Yes, I know now you’re not supposed to do that. For one, it can cause tooth decay when you let little ones fall asleep with a bottle in their mouth, and secondly, he never learned to put himself to sleep without our (or the bottle’s) help. We knew then that it wasn’t the best thing to do, but it worked, and trying something else seemed like a battle, and we were all exhausted at the end of the day. So that’s what we did. 

We knew that Noah not being able to fall asleep on his own was likely going to be an issue we’d have to address at some point, but we weren’t too concerned. The bigger problem was, he woke up at night around midnight for the first time and kept waking up, hungry, every 2-3 hours. Now that I was trying to get back on my own schedule, I was too exhausted to actually get up, sit in the chair in his room with him, rock him back to sleep, give him a bottle/nurse him and be up for at least 30 minutes. It’s not that we didn’t try, but this was all going on around the time when I started going back to work and no longer had the luxury of afternoon naps. I needed to get more sleep at night and having Noah right next to me definitely helped when he woke up to eat. I didn’t even have to really wake up to feed him. Sure, in a perfect world I would have done the sleep training with him then, but I decided it was more important for me to get a few more minutes of sleep. And so I would go to his room when he woke up, pick him up, bring him to bed with us, and feed him there. He would have a decent meal and go back to sleep, snuggled into mommy’s arms. And yes, you’re right, I know you’re already thinking it: I didn’t exactly hate it. I actually loved cuddling with him even if that meant I didn’t get a good night’s sleep.

While this was fine for a while as well, the older he became, the more he started to wiggle and turn and kick and punch, and he would sometimes be half-awake every couple of hours. Exhausting! When Tony went out of town for a few days on a work trip he realized how much better he slept at night without a little wiggly worm in bed and he became more serious in wanting to get Noah out of our bed and back to his crib. The problem was, he wanted it to happen but didn’t know where to start, so I decided to take it into my own hands. I would rather do it myself and do it “right” (or what I thought was right) than having Tony try a few different things with no logic or pattern behind it that would just cause everyone lots of frustration with no results. Who knows, maybe whatever he had in mind would have worked, but it didn’t sound promising (sorry Tony, you know I love you!).

Tony had suggested we should try the cry it out method. I was totally against it at first, but had also heard that it can work quickly if done right. Just stick with it for a few days, and you have a happy sleeping baby. I wasn’t exactly convinced, but it made me think I at least had to give it a try. I actually never really made the conscious decision to try and hadn’t planned for it. I had read about the method and had heard success stories, but wasn’t convinced it was right for us. My heart just didn’t like the idea. Anyway, one night, I tried to put Noah to sleep in his crib without his bottle. We had followed our regular routine and it was time for him to go to sleep. So after bath, books, and songs, I put him down, told him good night and left the room. Two seconds later, he was standing in his crib, crying. Poor thing. I set my timer to 3 minutes, then went back in, calmed him down, and laid him back down. And again, as soon as I left the room, he was up crying again. I waited another 3 minutes, then went back in. We played that game for, I don’t know, an hour maybe, but Noah just wouldn’t calm down. So I gave up, cuddled him, gave him his bottle, and he fell asleep in my arms in our bed. Sounds terrible, I know, and it wasn’t a pleasant evening. I felt awful for having put him through that and possibly having broken some basic trust bond between us. I was frustrated, cried, and blamed Tony for pushing me in that direction (even though he really didn’t). I felt bad, but realize now that it was good that I tried. We needed “proof” that it wasn’t going to work for us or it would have constantly been the “other option we could try”, preventing us from really committing to anything else. And like I said in another post, I think what makes us good parents is that we consider different options and are not afraid to try things even when we’re not 100% on board or to abandon things that just don’t seem right.

Some of you might say I was too soon to give up. I’ve read over and over that the key to sleep training is consistency; that it doesn’t really matter what you do as long as you stick with it, one hour clearly not being enough. But I should have known it wasn’t going to work for us when Noah would stand back up the second I laid him down. I read an interesting article once about tension increasers, babies who increase tension by crying and tension decreasers, babies who release tension by crying. For those babies that cry softly and keep their eyes closed and wind down while they cry, this method may work, but for those that never calm down, it’s just impossible. Noah is most definitely a tension increaser. After a while it took me forever to calm him down again, even when I picked him up. He was getting exhausted but not sleepy. So I’m certain it wouldn’t have worked even if he had stuck with it for a few days. Also, I think part of the problem was that we didn’t know what exact issue we were addressing. There were a few aspects involved and just getting him to fall asleep on his own wasn’t going to solve everything.

So we were back to the old routine, Noah falling asleep in his room, moving to our bed at around midnight, and waking up every few hours, often to eat. But that needed to change. I should mention that somewhere along this whole process Noah had weaned himself off nursing at about 10 months. It just naturally happened, he wanted it less, if at all, during the day, was happy with real food and the bottle, and gave up on it at night as well when he realized there wasn’t much left and the bottle was much more satisfying. It was a smooth and unexpected transition and I’m glad it just kind of happened, more or less on Noah’s schedule.

Anyway, so Noah was now about 11 months old and was getting ready to transition to his new class, First Steps, at daycare. He still drank a bottle of formula at daycare, some at home in the evening, and some at night. And we still had all issues to tackle: He didn’t fall asleep on his own without rocking/a bottle, didn’t sleep through the night, didn’t stay in his own bed at night, and wanted a bottle at night, whether because he was hungry or just for comfort.

I knew we weren’t going to solve all those problems at the same time so we decided to take a staggered approach, tackling each issue individually. We decided to try to get him to sleep through the night, no matter where. The first step was going to be: no more relying on a bottle to fall asleep, whether in the evening or in the middle of the night. So we introduced a more strict bed time routine and decided there weren’t going to be any more night time feedings. When he woke up at night, we gave him water instead of formula, but planned to keep a bottle as part of his bedtime routine. To our surprise, Noah didn’t mind at all. He probably hadn’t been actually hungry at night, he was just looking for comfort. So he got used to water, and after a week or so, he didn’t even care for that anymore. He would still wake up here and there and roll around, but he just needed to snuggle back in and would go back to sleep. That made me incredibly optimistic; it had been a lot easier and pain free than I had expected. It also helped immensely with our new bed time routine: he woke up hungry in the morning, and we made sure to feed him a good solid dinner at night. (The routine was: family dinner, bath time, reading a book in his room, laying down together in our bed where we would sing a few songs until he wiggled himself to sleep). He was enjoying real food so much, that he didn’t even care much for the bottle anymore. I offered it during our bedtime routine, but he was still full from dinner and wanted to read another book instead. Fine by me! So for a few days the only bottle he got was at daycare, but when they said he didn’t really need it anymore there either, we stopped sending one to daycare as well. It was all water in sippy cups from here on. So, we were excited, we had wanted to figure out was the sleep problems, but what we had accomplished, with no hassle at all, was to wean him off the bottle just a couple of weeks before his first birthday. That was a big first step.

Weaning Noah off the bottle, especially at night, was great progress and I loved how naturally it had happened, but Tony and I still weren’t getting a lot of sleep at night with all the wiggling and squirming and occasional unexplainable unhappy cry. We tried again for a while to put him in his own crib after he had fallen asleep, but he would still wake up, looking for us to cuddle with, no later than midnight at which point we just brought him back to bed with us. Yes, we had replaced the comfort bottle with a comfort body to cuddle with. We tried on occasion to make him stay in his bed, but we weren’t consistent and I knew that was the issue. He needed to learn that it was okay to be alone in bed and he didn’t need to cuddle with us at night to be safe. When a four day weekend came up over Labor Day, Noah was 13 months old, Tony and I decided that this was our chance. We sat down together and figured out a plan. I knew this was only going to work if we were 100% on the same page. There was only one rule: under no circumstances will we bring him back to our bed. Period. For the first few nights, Noah still woke up quite a few times and we ended up taking turns going to his room and helping him fall back asleep by laying him back down, whispering calming words or humming a song to let him know we were there. For the most part, he just needed to feel that he wasn’t alone. I usually just rest my hand on his shoulders until he is back asleep, in a deep sleep, which during the first nights sometimes took up to 30 minutes. If I tried to leave while he was still in the transition phase of falling asleep, he would be back up 5 minutes later.

I think we were all amazed of how well it worked. All of us woke up well rested and happy the next morning. So while one of us had to get up every couple of hours for the first few nights, by the end of the long weekend Noah had completely slept through the whole night without waking up once. Of course my body was still on that schedule and I kept waking up a few times (and yes, I did go to his room to make sure he was still breathing, only to find him sound asleep and peaceful in his crib), but that only lasted for a few days.

Almost three weeks later he has good and not-so-good nights. While some nights he doesn’t wake us up once, during others he is still up 3-4 times, but it usually only takes a minute or two to put him back to sleep; he never completely wakes up so all we have to do is lay him back down in his crib and put our hand on his back. At just over a year old, I’m super happy with that. We probably could have made more progress early on if we had tried harder, but I think that would have involved more frustration, tears, and possibly less sleep. So I’m glad we did it the way we did.

There are a few different factors involved that made this transition so smooth I think:

• We waited for the right moment and didn’t try to force anything on us before Noah or we were ready. When it felt right, we just went for it.  
• We paid attention to what Noah wanted. Comfort and safety was what he needed, so that’s what he got. 
• All of this happened around the same time Noah transitioned to his new class at daycare where they’re a lot more active than in the infant room and where kids are on a schedule (all eat together at the table and take naps at the same time). 
• We didn’t do it all at once, but tried to change things one step at a time. For example, it doesn’t bother me one bit that he doesn’t fall asleep on his own in the evenings and we still have to lay down in bed with him. We’ll tackle that when we’re ready. 
• Tony and I were on the same page and agreed on basic (very basic) rules and stuck with them.
• Noah sleeps through the night better (and falls asleep faster) when we wear him out in the afternoon (hence the frequent trips to the playground in the afternoon), stick to our evening routine, and take him to bed somewhat early. Of course that doesn’t always work out with our own schedule, but if we can avoid him getting cranky/too tired in the first place, everything just goes a bit more smoothly.

Now that Noah is teething again, wish us luck and strength to see this through so we won't fall back into old patterns again should nights get rough.