Macy will be 8 months old next Monday. This is the same week that Liam started crawling. Here is a picture of him when he was seven months old:
Wow. I just can't remember him as a baby anymore. It's sad how the true memories fade. I can remember through pictures, but I just can't conceptualize that he was, at one time, where Macy is now:
I have hesitated to blog it for fear that I would, once again, jinx it, but it appears that MACY IS SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT!! Wooo hooo!!
We've always been against utilizing CIO for our children and have always said that we'd rather invest the time in soothing them to sleep so that they know we are there for them. At the same time, Macy was learning that all she had to do was cry to get out of her crib and play around for an hour or two in the middle of the night...more than once. We were walking around like zombies; moreso than we were during Liam's first couple months.
My only real exposure to the Ferber Method was through Meet the Fockers. The kids' pediatricians' office also supports Ferber. I didn't ask too much about it because I knew it was not for us (at least how Robert DeNiro portrayed it), but then I was sitting there thinking, hmm, "Ferber 'Method.'" Perhaps there is more to it than straight CIO if there is actually a "method" to it.
I read up a little and found that it's not simply leaving your child and walking away Day 1 to cry it out; rather, you stay and rub your baby's back, leaving and coming back at longer intervals each time.
We decided to kind of go halfway on it. We've committed to not picking her up, and instead rubbing her back, leaving, and coming back, but we don't plan on building to the point where we leave her to cry it out once and for all.
It's worked like a charm. It really didn't take too long to train her that she might as well get back to sleep because we don't plan on picking her up. We never got to the point where we have to leave the room for long stretches to get her to soothe herself. It's like she just needed a little nudge towards independence, and then she started sleeping through the night and putting herself to sleep when we put her down. It used to be that she had better be out like a light because if you botched the transfer to the crib, the 45-minute process of getting her to sleep started all over again.
Life is good again. Unless it's my own insomnia getting in the way, I have had stretches where I've had more sleep than I know what to do with. We've woken up on weekends a couple times, looked at the clock, and found that it was after 7. We NEVER thought this would happen again!
The only hitch is that she refuses - absolutely refuses - to take any paci but her 0-6 month MAM's. We LOVE MAM pacis, but the smaller ones only come in clear colors. If ONLY we could get her to take the larger ones, 1) I would not be so afraid of her swallowing it and 2) they come in darker colors that she could find and put back in her mouth herself. As it stands now, she will wake up a couple times during the night needing her paci back.
Hey, it could be a whole lot worse!
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