Comments on: Dr. Ferber, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the CIO

By: I’d be a perfect mother if you paid me for it. | Rocket City Digs

I’d be a perfect mother if you paid me for it. | Rocket City Digs — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 17:07:14 +0000

[...] without her crying for more than a minute. So what did we do? Scrapped the No-Cry and went for a cry-it-out solution, which worked brilliantly for us. And it cost us $14.95 for the [...]

By: Jody

Jody — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:40:09 +0000

Firstly, don’t sweat your friends. What’s right for your family is right for your family. And there’s a reason they’re passing laws about letting air traffic controllers sleep.

At 21 months, she’s a terrific sleeper. She has some bad spells–occasionally we’ll need to comfort her in the night, and sometimes she regresses and we have to do another bout of check-ins, but that never lasts more than one or, at most, two nights. Then she’s back to right as rain. We put her to bed at 8 PM (no matter how amped she seems to be, once she’s in the sleepsack and we say “night-night” she’s ready for bed) and 19 nights out of 20, she’s down for the night and wakes somewhere around 8 or 8:30ish AM. We’re not really sure, as she stays quiet and entertains herself until David goes in to get her up.

According to the book we used, night weaning is supposed to come BEFORE sleep training, but getting her to go to sleep on her own was such a nightmare that we wanted to do that first. And really, the night weaning isn’t that bad as long as you stick with the advance feeding concept–wake him up a half hour before he usually eats, feed him a little bit, and then put him back to sleep, and gradually wind down the amount you’re feeding him over a series of nights. After a few nights you’ll have trained him to know that people don’t eat at night.

This is all assuming, of course, that your little guy is sleep-trainable in this way–a lot of kids just aren’t, in which case you’d need to try another method. But if it seems to be going well, keep up with it. Take a lot of notes and make sure you and your partner are on the same page before bedtime. Good luck!

One other tip: as Heather mentioned, watching the clock can also be really difficult, which is why we bought a large-display digital clock that shows the seconds ticking. We couldn’t live without it now!

By: Adrienne

Adrienne — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:14:04 +0000

So is E still a good sleeper? I am in the process of CIO (to the horror of all my friends) and it seems to be going well. We are night weening after CIO too. L was waking up every 45 min -2 hours. Two hours was the best we had done in weeks. I was a zombie. I’ve been feeding him at night after 6 hours, so 2am, but last night i caved and fed him at 5:30am as well, and then he slept till 7:30. After reading your night weening blogpost i’m not sure I should have done that, but maybe we’ll worry about night weening in another few weeks.

Thanks for the post.

By: Heather

Heather — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:46:13 +0000

Thanks for the run down. I’ve recently read the same book, and cannot decide when the perfect time to sleep train my DD is. She has two types of nights. She either takes the 7pm power nap and refuses to sleep till 10:30 or 11 and then wakes every three hours or so, or she goes down fighting at 7:30 or 8 and wakes every 45 minutes all night long. We nurse out of desparation every time she wakes up. I am most confused about the night weaning, and to me it sounds a bit worse than the sleep training. Timing the feeds and looking at a clock all while completely sleep deprived??!! I just can’t manage to do it.

By: Doing the Best We Can « Rocket City Digs

Doing the Best We Can « Rocket City Digs — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:22:03 +0000

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