Hello Sleep

I would like to say that Andy and I had a very thoughtful plan in regards to getting Henry sleep trained. I imagined long conversations over vanilla lattes (me) and flow charts and graphs and the all important spreadsheet (him). I figured we would start on a night where we both had gotten a bit of sleep. I thought we’d get Henry in a stable schedule during the day before hand. And somewhere in there, I had guessed that we’d be too scared shitless to bother at all and he’d finally get a proper night sleep when he was a teenager.

As it happened, Henry was sleep trained on the night before we left for vacation and he was sleep trained out of pure frustration on my part.

That fateful night we put Henry down to sleep at 6:30 PM as normal. He woke again at 8 PM, where we picked him up and rocked him until he fell asleep again. He then woke at 11 PM and as it was my night, I decided just to sleep with him on the couch. For two hours Henry and I tried as we might to get comfortable without any success. He was exhausted, I was exhausted, I finally lost it and said, “Fuck it, I’m sleep training. Like, right now.”

For two hours it was a battle of wills. I did the whole rubbing the back and saying “shhhh” for two minutes, and then went away as he screamed his head off. I increased the time before I went back gradually. Henry cried and sobbed and screamed and kept pulling himself up in the crib (had to put him back down on his belly when this happened) and I played Sudoku in between crib visits. As I said, it took two hours before he finally feel asleep. By the first half hour, Andy had woken up (who can sleep with a screaming baby?), and I’m sure we kept our neighbors up as well. He was a stubborn little man, which he gets from me, but sometimes the only way to combat stubbornness is with more mature and skilled stubbornness.

Because we went on vacation the next day, I was convinced that Henry would revert back to his old sleeping habits while at his nan’s house. But for the three nights he was there, he slept like a dream. Had I broken the proverbial stallion?

When we got Henry back on Thursday night, I again was terrified what our night was going to be like. But he slept through. Last night he had a little backtrack and we had to do the same sleep training at 11 PM – but instead of two hours, it only took a half hour. So you know, progress.

As I was saying to Andy, besides the constant crying, sleep training is much more preferable to rocking a baby for an unknown period of time hoping to hope that when you put him down he’ll actually stay asleep. At least with sleep training, you can become a master at Sudoku.