FOR CRYING OUT LOUD

I’ve already written about my “sleep karma” - how Arden slept through the night from day two and how Alex, though quite possibly the cutest baby on earth, with thighs you just want to sink your teeth into, is the devil child when it comes to sleeping. Well, after two solid months of Alex waking up literally every hour, on the hour, we decided it was time for some tough love.


The job of sleep training Alex fell on me because when Jen goes into the baby’s room at night the baby expects some boob and if she doesn't get it, she isn't going back down, so we had to take Jen out of the equation. We had tried various “no tears” methods, but they yielded little or no results so with much reluctance we decided to try the Ferber Method also known as the “Cry It Out” Method. If you’re not familiar with this method, basically what you do is put the baby down while they’re still awake and leave them there to cry themselves to sleep. Ferber calls it “self-soothing.” I call it mutual torture. Obviously the baby isn’t happy, but it also breaks your heart to hear them crying their little eyes out. You’re not supposed to completely ignore them, you have to wait various intervals before attending to them and by attending I mean further torturing them. You’re supposed to go in, rub their back for a minute and walk out and then let them cry for a longer period of time or until they “sooth themselves to sleep.” Well that first night was probably the most excruciating night of my life, mostly because my Time Warner internet connection wasn’t cooperating and I couldn’t do anything to distract myself. But after about 23 minutes she stopped crying. I wasn’t terribly impressed because hell, if I cried for 23 minutes straight I’d pass out too. But what was impressive was that she didn’t make a peep until 3:00 AM. Of course I was up that entire time waiting for her to cry. But when she eventually did I continued to follow Ferber’s instructions and waited the appropriate interval before I went in to rub her back and eventually she fell back to sleep, this time until morning. The next night she cried for about half that time and when she fell asleep she didn’t wake up again until morning. In fact I had to get up in the middle of the night to check and see if she was still alive. And to pee. I’ve got a bladder like a pregnant woman. Well within a week Alex was sleeping like a proverbial baby. Now I just give her a bath, a bottle and a bedtime story and she goes down without a fight. Which means I can finally write at night again and still have it make sense in the morning.


There are a lot of haters out there when it comes to letting your kid cry it out. And personally I thought it was kind of mean too. Maybe a month before we officially decided to go the Ferber route we tested the waters with it and lasted about three minutes before rushing into her room and stuffing a boob in her mouth. But that only kept her down for an hour or so. And after the aforementioned two months of no sleep I was starting to feel like Christian Bale in The Machinist. I couldn’t function. I was a zombie. And I swear I was starting to hallucinate. That or the cat really told me she was going to kill me. Anyway, now that Alex is sleeping through the night she’s a much happier baby, she doesn’t require a binky anymore and she’s napping like a champ. As a result we’re much happier too and finally we’re back to sleeping through the night as well. Well mostly, I still need to get up to pee several times a night. Maybe it’s time to get my prostate checked.