Sleep Training - Ferber Method - Night 1

I know this is a very controversial topic, but I thought I would blog about it to give people a 1st hand experience. When researching the ferber method, I couldn't really find a lot of people talking about what their experience with it was. So here's our story...

Lillian started sleeping through the night around 3 months. It was the most wonderful thing in the world. Unfortunately around 4 months, she started waking up again. This coincided with us starting to pack up the old house, so we figured she would get better once we got settled in the new house. At first, she was just waking up once a night, then it was twice a night... and then everything just went to hell. For the last 3 weeks she's been waking up 4-6 times a night. Sometime she was hungry. Sometime she wasn't. Sometimes she could be consoled back to sleep quickly, sometimes she couldn't. Its been a nightmare. I mean seriously. I'm extremely sleep deprived and getting more depressed with each sleepless night. I bought the ferber book a few weeks again because I didn't know what else to do. I read it and it seemed to make sense, but then Lillian got a cold so I didn't want to try it while she already wasn't feeling well.

We had planned to try this weekend, but I decided on the fly to start last night. Lillian went to bed around 8:00pm, and woke up at 8:30 totally inconsolable. Nothing I could do was calming her down so I figured screw it, let's give this thing a try.... so our night looked like this:


8:45 - put her in the bed since she was screaming her head off already. Checked her at following intervals: 3 min, 5 min, 7 min and then she fell asleep at 7 mins (right before I was going to go in).

10:15 - woke up. checked her at the following intervals: 3 min, 5 min, and then she fell asleep at 4 mins

4:15 - woke up. Checked on her at the following intervals: 3 min, 5 min, 7 min, and then she fell asleep at 6 mins. When I went in at 3mins her diaper was really wet so I changed her diaper. While changing the diaper I noticed her feet were cold so I put some socks on her feet before I put her jammies back on. This was probably the hardest waking because she usually eats around this time. But I don't think she needs to eat for nutritional purposes, rather for comfort, so I decided to skip the feeding.

6:30am - went in to wake her up to go to work/daycare. She was still pretty sleepy but when she woke up she was her normal smiley self.

It was really hard to listen to her cry (i turned down the sound on our video monitor down but we share a wall), but overall waking up just 3 times was a HUGE improvement for us. Hopefully we'll continue to improve tonight!  I couldn't fall back asleep after her 4:15 waking for about an hour so I'm still pretty tired, but I feel hopeful that this will get the whole house back on track.