Sleeping Babies

The other day I saw a short piece on "Ferberizing", which aims at teaching infants to self-sooth, so that you can put them to bed without them being completely asleep. The short piece I saw specifically stated that the Ferber method is not recommended for infants younger than 4-6 months. This caused me to start recalling our own experiences with putting TGM to sleep.

TGM was less than two months old when we started to put her to bed without her being completely asleep. And while I expect that our case is the exception rather than the rule, it was a sanity saver for us!

We have been wildly blessed with a daughter who started sleeping through the night at less than a month old--even if her "night" started after midnight...sometimes 1:00 AM or later. I think the turning point on moving to an earlier bedtime was to give up on putting her to bed asleep. It was some "night" at 1:00AM when it occurred to my groggy, sleep-deprived brain that TGM wasn't crying--she just wasn't sleeping. And in a fit of desperation for sleep, I walked out of her room and headed to bed, fully expecting to hear her crying before I made it to bed or (perhaps worse) in 10-15 minutes just as I was getting to sleep. But when I heard her crying and checked the clock, it was hours later and I could only presume that she had fallen to sleep just fine without me.

We have friends and family that used and recommended using recorded music (tapes or CD's) when putting young children to sleep. Since (for our own sanity), we were putting her down before she was completely asleep, we pulled out a CD we'd received of classical music for babies and began turning it on when we were leaving the room. As we were no longer feeling the need to see her to sleep before we went to bed, we were then able to move her bedtime to earlier in the evening by putting her down at progressively earlier times. We have settled into a bed time around 9:00, but that can be pushed back to closer to 10:00 when we aren't leaving clogging until after 9:00.

We are extremely grateful that she continues to sleep very well. She has her nights--usually when we are traveling or when she isn't feeling well, but even those tend to be few and far between. I won't be surprised if I have some future child that doesn't sleep nearly as well. And then I will look back and realize that I don't appreciate this fully....but I'm trying to appreciate it as much as someone who doesn't know any differently can.