After our trip last week it’s been nice to spend some time at home. Brian picked up some shifts at the bookstore so all three of us went into work on Thursday and Friday. Oliver is officially too old to come to work with me. He won’t sleep very long in my office and proves himself a huge distraction to my coworkers so his days of hanging out at the store are numbered. We haven’t had any luck finding a day care that we like that can take Oliver this fall so we’ve decided that Brian will stay home with him. At first we had thought that Brian would sub this semester but then we did the math and figured out he’d be working just so we could afford day care (which we can’t find anyway) so it just makes more sense to have Brian watch him while I work. We have found a day care that we really like and Oliver is on the wait list so he will hopefully have a spot when Brian starts working in the spring.
The biggest development of the last week was the beginning of our sleep training. We are using the Ferber method where you put your child down in their crib while they are still awake and let them learn to soothe themselves to sleep. The theory is that if your child learns to soothe himself to sleep, then he will be able to go back to sleep in the middle of the night if he wakes up. You go in and check on the kid (but don’t pick him up) at certain intervals which lengthen throughout the night until they go to sleep on their own. (This method often gets a bad rep because people think it involves sticking your baby in a crib and then letting him scream alone in a room until he passes out. That’s not how it works.) Oliver is right at the youngest age where you should try this method so I was a little nervous to see if he was ready for this program or if he was still too young to learn to self-soothe.
We started Friday night and it has been going really well. We took Oliver out of his swaddle (which I thought would be the hardest part) and put him into his crib “relaxed but awake.” On Friday night, he cried for about ten minutes after we put him to bed and then slept for three hours, cried for another fifteen minutes and then slept for another three hours. We went in and checked on him every three to five minutes when he was crying. I fed him at that point and he slept for another four hours. All in all, Friday night felt like a success. Last night was even better. We put him in his crib at 8:30, he cried for about a minute and a half and then slept until 3:00. I fed him at that point, put him back in his crib and he slept until 7:00. We didn’t have to do any checking on him last night because he never cried more than a few minutes. I feel so well-rested today and any doubts I had about whether or not he was ready for this have been completely put aside. We’ll see how the rest of the week goes but it seems to me like Oliver was ready to make this change. Even being out of the swaddle hasn’t bothered him much (although he did scratch his face up pretty good on Friday night... we’ve been putting him in those no-scratch mittens for naps and bedtime now). His naps have been going fairly well, also. All his naps are taking place in his crib (before he was swaddled and in his swing). They are shorter than before but today he managed a two hour nap. I think they’ll get better as the week goes on. I’ll update later this week with any progress or regression as we keep striving towards better sleep habits.
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