Crying It Out

Pacifiers are an evil thing in my opinion. Claire was addicted to them for sleeping, meaning our nightly routine was as follows:

• Lay baby in crib at bedtime
• Screaming commences
• Parent inserts pacifier in mouth
• Screaming stops and baby sleeps
• Baby, as part of the natural sleep cycle, wakes slightly and, realizing something is amiss (i.e., the paci is no longer in baby’s mouth), wakes completely
• Screaming commences
• Parent runs upstairs (or, if parent is sleeping, trudges down the hall), enters baby’s room, and inserts paci back in baby’s mouth
• Screaming stops and baby (about 90% of the time) goes back to sleep
• Repeat 3-8 times per night

I’ve been exhausted and moody from getting up with Claire so much. Dave has been on Claire duty every third night, and had offered to take more nights, but I’ve refused additional help because it doesn’t seem fair to him when he has to go into the office and I can stay home and sleep when Claire naps (though I rarely do – I think lack of sleep has actually made it more difficult for me to nap).

So Dave and I had to make a decision about how to handle her sleep issue. I have three books that address baby/kid sleep issues, and among them they cover the spectrum of sleep solutions. Actually “spectrum” might not be the right word as there seems to be just two camps of solving baby sleep issues: crying it out and everything else. The cry-it-out (CIO) advocates believe that a child needs to learn the very important skill of falling asleep on one's own and should be left alone to learn it, which nearly always means letting the child cry herself to sleep. The other camp believes that CIO is unnatural and cruel and suggests other methods, such as rocking the child to sleep and then putting her down without waking her (easier said than done!), doing that each time the child cries out during the night, and gradually decreasing the length of time spent soothing until the child learns to go to sleep on her own.

Dave and I knew we had to take away the pacifier since it was interrupting her and our sleep. We had to decide whether to take it away cold turkey and let her figure out how to self-soothe or whether to choose one of the “gentler” methods.

We chose to let her cry, as hard as that is. (I never understood why parents had such a difficult time ignoring their children’s cries until I had kids.) The first night was brutal since she screamed and cried for about 45 minutes. But then she fell asleep around 8 PM and slept until 7 AM! She cried for about 15 minutes for each nap the next day, and the next night she cried for about 20 minutes before falling asleep for the night. It’s been a week and though she still cries some when she’s put into her bed, it usually lasts 30 seconds. (Yes, that’s seconds. It’s like she thinks, “No, I don’t want to go to bed! No! Oh, wait. OK, I’m tired. Night-night.”)

Getting rid of the pacifier has not made her sleep through the night (7 PM to 7 AM) every night like we’d hoped, but if she does wake during the night, it’s usually one time and it’s to eat and then go right back to sleep. Now maybe in another month or two I’ll be caught up on my sleep!