How the nights became ours to sleep again

Almost two months ago my son turned one. That was just unbelievable! Amazing how fast the last year has gone by. And I’m simply astonished how much one year has brought, changed, and taken. In my last blog post, couple of days before Christmas, and as the title of the post was saying, we were planning on doing some sleep training with our little fella.

And sleep training we did! And now, two months later we are wondering why in the earth we did not do it earlier?! Before we started the sleep training, I was researching and reading things about it, and one of my favourite sites for it turned out to be Dr Craig Canapari’s blog Evidence-based advice for better sleep in kids, teens, and parents. The whole blog spoke to me, the advice sounded very practical and also the comments from other people, and the fact that Dr Canapari is taking his time to respond to people commenting his blog posts made an impression on me.

After reading his blog posts and checking out links to other experts, I quickly realised that our son had inappropriate sleep onset associations.

Right before we started the sleep training we were in a situation where after the evening routine (we’ve had a bedtime routine in place since our son was born, so that was not a new thing for us, and that we really didn’t have to change it a great deal) one of us would sit by our son’s bed, holding his hand so long that he would fall in sleep. Often this took  no longer than 15 minutes, (rarely up to 30-40 minutes), and that was actually fine. The problem was that when our son would wake up during the night, two or three times a night, he needed hand holding to fall back asleep. Often at early morning hours we found ourselves freezing by his bed, holding his hand for very long times, because for some reason he would instantly wake up when we took our hand away.

So how did we do training? I know there are lots and lots of views on cry-it-out -method, and how bad it is and sounds… However, in our case – and perhaps we are very lucky – it worked very quickly and without too much crying and feeling bad! We followed the five minute rule: after putting our little fella into bed, I sang a song, and said good night, how much I love him, sleep well, sweet dreams and see you in the morning… and then I walked out. In the first night he cried, and I entered after five minutes. He calmed straight away. After staying a short while, saying the same good night, love you, sleep well, sweet dreams and see you in the morning, I walked out again, and he cried… I waited for six minutes this time… Yes, these are some of the longest minutes! But already before six minutes were over, he was quiet and fallen asleep! The following night we had to go in after six minutes, and started to count for the seven minutes, but didn’t reach it: he had fallen asleep!

The most amazing thing? His nightly wakings also disappeared to most part: in the beginning he woke up couple of times during the night, one of us went in (usually my husband), checked all was ok,  but no hand holding sessions to get him back to sleep. We were expecting that there would be some relapses after three, four nights, and it would get really hard, but that did not happen. After almost a year of not sleeping a single night through, we finally were there! Our son goes to bed around 7:30/8pm and wakes up between 6:10-6:30am.

Our bedtime routine is always the same, and currently it is like this: After his evening porridge it is time for butt washing, then pyjamas on, teeth brushing, cuddling up on a chair to read a night-time story, putting our son to bed, turning the light off, singing a song, saying good night and walking out. No crying, no fuss. Before we started the sleep training, the routine was pretty much the same, except that I was still breastfeeding and that happened after his evening porridge and he often got very sleepy and we were not then reading any night-time story, teeth brushing was the last thing before bed and hand holding.

I had started to reduce the number of breastfeeding times already earlier before he started in day-care. Then throughout the Christmas time I was slowing reducing it first to two times per day (morning and evening), then to ones a day, then kept a day in between free, and on the eve of his first birthday I had weaned him off. It went better than expected, he didn’t seem to miss it (lots of cuddling and kissing in any case!), and my boobs took it well too- not really discomfort at all.

What else did we change?

When we decided on the training, we agreed that we would do things exactly the same, my husband and I. We also decided that we would not continue to be the pacifier fetchers for our son. That had most likely also contributed to the nightly wakings, him losing the pacifier, waking up and needing us to give it back. We ended up putting several pacifiers into the corner of his bed, we stopped giving the pacifier to him, we let him self pick it when he is put to bed, and that has helped. At nights he has been then finding the other pacifiers if he has lost one, and no need for us picking the pacifier. Recently, when we have had several visitors and he has been sleeping in our bedroom, I have noticed that he only seems to need the pacifier to fall asleep in the evening. He hasn’t had the pacifier in his mouth any more later when we have got to bed, and also in the morning he hasn’t picked pacifier into his mouth (busy talking!). Perhaps this would be the time to get rid of them once and for all?

At day-care, our son has now adjusted to have only one nap during the day. He sleeps about two, two and half, up to three hours every day between 12-3pm. Couple of months ago, he still needed an early morning nap, around 10am, but this often meant that he would not fall asleep before later in the afternoon, and at day-care that was not working out, and he slowly got used to being up until the midday nap time. After that happened, he usually would get sleepy also around 5pm, and sometimes had a nap on my lap then (max. 20 minutes), but also this has now dropped away.

One more thing what we also changed with the sleep training was our mornings. Before, we had always picked our son up since woke up so early (often before or around 5am) and brought him to our bed to lay there for a little while, cuddle and look at his books or toys to give us a chance to rest a little longer, even if being awake. Now, there is no more lounging in the bed. When he wakes up, it means we get up! Lights turn on in the kitchen, coffee by the table, not in the bed… And breakfast for all! But since we are waking AND getting up around 6:30am that is of course fine!

And then, on 26th March daylight saving begins…