All about the Zs...

Sleep. I love sleep. Absolutely absolutely love sleep. Thing is, if I had known how little sleep I would have been getting after giving birth, I'd have slept for a whole week or month before popping.

John is a lovely baby. Everything about him is fabulous. Except sleep. Here's a little summary of his sleep patterns up till about 2 weeks ago.

For the first few months of his life, he had to be shushed and rocked to sleep. On top of that, he only slept on James or myself. At night, James would take the first shift and I'd take the second half of the night. And John would only sleep in our arms or on our chests. It was really difficult. We then put him in a co-sleeper by our bed and we yielded to pressures and gave him a pacifier, which he got so used to he couldn't sleep without one. But he still had to be aided to sleep.

We were still really tired and worn out so we decided to bring him into our bed. He slept in between us and everytime he woke at night, I'd feed him and he went back to sleep. This seemed to work for a while and he started to sleep for longer stretches of 4 - 5 hours. But after one week of success, things went wrong again. He was expecting to suckle each and everytime he woke, which amounted to about 5 - 6 times a night. No one would be happy waking that many times a night. Certainly John was suffering just as we were. We were hoping that he would sleep better after starting solids, but no, that didn't help. I even bought formula hoping that would help him at night. But the bub absolutely hated it. So we made a very hard decision to sleep train John.

All this while, I had been reading book after book about babies and sleep looking for a solution to help John. We decided to sleep train him using the method by Tizzie Hall in her book Save Our Sleep. It's a variant of the cry-it-out approach but John is assured we're there with him if he can't settle.

Before we started, I prayed that God would give John the wisdom to learn how to settle and re-settle when he woke in the middle of the night. I prayed too that God would protect him physically and mentally and that He would help speed this process along.

We started on 2 January and I can say that God is indeed good. John learnt to self-settle by the 2nd night and was sleeping for longer stretches at a time! On the night of 3 Jan, he slept from 7.25pm all the way till 5am with only a 3 minute peep at 10.30pm! The next weekend, we moved him into his own room and although we had to sort of 'start over' because he was now in a new environment, he only took a night to get into the hang of things again!

So, for the record, my baby is sleeping through the night from 7+pm to 6+am with only one feed at 11pm!!!!!!!!!!!!! And he no longer uses a pacifier! Hallelujah! God indeed is good and He certainly answers prayers. I am finally sleeping much better at night and so is James. Here's to making up for all the lost sleep over the last 7 months!