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Nearly 10 months of disturbed sleep and finally we snapped today. Luckily this didn’t end with one of us turning the gun on ourselves (but give us another couple of weeks - and a gun- and you never know), but we sort some advice on how to get Ernie to sleep through the night.
I have been a bit reluctant to do this. Babies are like dogs, in that there are about a billion “experts†on each (and I bet a few on both) who will give you wildly varying advice on how to train them and my default setting is “This is all bullshitâ€. And we are by no means the unluckiest people when it comes to baby sleeping times. He might wake once or twice a night (sometimes more, but never less) and is pretty much always up by 5.30. We have been taking turns to sleep in with him (and I’ve tried to do a bit more than half because of the time I spent away on tour), but we have both been ground down by lack of sleep. It dominoes into the rest of your day, making us irritable and argumentative, making it hard to work or exercise or look after the kids. Actually just having someone round to acknowledge that that was a thing was an enormous help. If she’d left after that bit I would still have been happy. But the sleep expert was a sensible woman, looking at it all logically and sympathetically and able to identify the things we were doing that weren’t helping and come up with something that might help us out.
Not that the solution was very pleasant, as it basically involved reprogramming our son so that he goes down and sleeps without us being very present. Which she admitted would mean some crying and distress. Basically you put the baby down in the cot, say it’s sleepy time, pat them on the shoulder and leave. They will then cry, but you leave it one minute before coming back in, doing the same thing and leaving. No hugs, no chat, just go and unless they make themselves sick or look like they’re going to throw up (high likelihood) you keep this going. Next time you wait two minutes, then three and so on up to fifteen. And if they’re still awake and crying then you go in every fifteen minutes until they are asleep. It’s you versus them in a battle of exhaustion.
And then if they wake up in the night, you do the same thing.
I knew that Catie would find that tough, so I volunteered for the first few goes and she went to sleep in a room where she was unlikely to hear the nightmare unfold.
Predictions were that the first time it might take over an hour and that the night time wake up might be just as bad. Ernie had pretty much fallen asleep on the bottle before bed, but we’d been encouraged not to let him fall asleep like that, so whilst I didn’t quite wake him, I didn’t worry about being quite as quiet as usual. He woke up when I turned out the light and the performance began.
It wasn’t easy to leave a crying child standing in his cot, but I am made of strong stuff and also I love a schedule and I stuck with it. I wondered if I was making my son hate me or unsettling him and we had earlier had a discussion about the psychology of this. Of course some “experts†disagree but this woman suggested that this relatively short period of distress was less harmful to children than the alternative and that he should pick up what was going on pretty quickly.
And it worked pretty well in that this first session only took about an hour to work (and I played some good Civilisation II in the interim and then remarkably he stayed asleep until 5am and even then fell back asleep on his own. I got maybe seven straight hours sleep, which is incredible. I think part of the success might just have been down to letting him sleep in the room alone - obviously as much as he disturbs us, we disturb him in return. But even so, this was a very welcome step forwards.
Give it a go. It’s a bit like a baby Guantanamo Bay, but we all know how successful that technique was in obliterating terrorism. And a non-sleeping baby is much worse than anything ISIS could dream up.
