After eight straight days of me trying to slowly ease Charlotte out of her addiction to her swaddle we tried a new approach. Jay got home from camp last week on Friday and we had a busy weekend of back to school shopping, going out to dinner, church and a Bradley reunion. Not much sleeping happened for Charlotte and definitely not many scheduled naps in her crib. So come Monday we knew that we had to really buckle down, and buckle down we did. After an inspirational conversation on facebook with some of my most respected momma’s we decided to go with “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child” a sleep training book by Dr. Weissbluth. He has three methods that you can choose from and they range from letting children cry it out (as long as 60 minutes during the day) all the way to more of an attachment style (totally what I was rocking last week). After some input from other momma’s and a couple of walks and discussion with Jay and myself we decided to just jump right into the book and do exactly what it said. On Monday morning we started; Charlotte was to be fed, laid down in her crib awake and we were to let her cry for up to one hour without going to her to comfort or soothe. I predicted that she would cry for 45 minutes, Jay predicted an hour...an hour it was! She cried for the full hour and when we went up stairs to get her up she was doing that ugly cry, with sniffling and snorting...the whole works. I felt so bad for her! Jay was definitely the strong hold and kept me from going up stairs.
Well, we have been at it all week and she has really improved! Of course, Jay and I being our nerdy selves, decided we could see progress better if we graphed the results. This is her graph for this past week. You can see (I really apologize again for the nerdiness!) she has really cried less and less all week. A good nice “down and to the right” graph, as Jay describes it. This shows her three naps a day, for the past four days...how much less she is crying now than she was at the beginning of the week.
It turns out that all of the advice of removing the swaddle cold turkey (rachel) and just biting the bullet and letting her cry it out (facebook mom advice panel) really did work. She is currently sleeping in her crib with no swaddle and I am writing a blog post down stairs in the family room! Amazing!
Here is a shot of C after a “nap” on Monday and then a shot of her after a real nap on Wednesday, notice the difference!
The two best highlights of this week on accounts of her new found sleep schedule...
First, Jay and I have watched tv on the couch, without child for the past two nights! We have not watched tv in months and now actually get to spend some time winding down at the end of the day...it is great! She goes down around 7:30 after a bath and a bottle and no swaddling, shushing, bouncing! Lovely!
The second highlight was the bike ride we took last night. We were suppose to have about an hour before we needed to start the bedtime routine, so we took Charlotte’s first bike ride in her buggy. She started off nicely...
but before we knew it, she was totally passed out!
This girl is falling asleep left and right now! We are not finished with the training yet, but we love some progress!
-melissa