the last word?

I’m not going to count on anything lasting longer than a month, anymore, ever. At least not until he’s 18.

That said, there’s a sense of wanting to post a wrap-up to the latest round of sleep training.

This time, it was like the books said. Three nights of crying. And then the fourth night he cried for less than five minutes. And the last two nights, more of a complaining whimper that lasted only a few seconds, maybe a minute.

On that fourth night, Scott wasn’t home. It was me and the nanny. Which presented a quandary of sorts since up to that point, we’d been having Scott do the final steps of the bedtime routine to help break Jonah of the nursing-himself-to-sleep habit.

Nanny was going to do it. I stood outside of the nursery, listening to her read him books, my heart aching. She’d been with him all afternoon. I’d barely seen him at all since lunch. This didn’t feel right. I was pacing my office when I heard her exit the nursery with him in arms. “Maybe you could sing to him a little?” she suggested.

Thank goodness.

That boy squirmed like a mad greased monkey trying to get at my boobs, but I held on, sang, swayed a little. (Rather than the hard swingy-rocking we had been doing in the past to practically knock him unconscious. Aside from the fact that the efficacy had passed its due date on that technique, my body has passed the threshold of its ability to hold him and swing back and forth for that long, at his current size.)

Eventually he gave up and nestled his face into my neck. After a few rounds of “Angels Watching Over Me,” “Lov-er-ly” and “Don’t Fence Me In” (just wait till he’s old enough to get the irony of that one), I put him down, gamely trying to rub his back as he crawled around in little circles, face into mattress, pushing up to all fours, rolling sideways, pushing up again, reaching for the crib bars. Trying to protest, and just too tired.

Tonight, Scott was home, but I took the singing duties again. Mere minutes after book time with daddy ended and singing began, the boy was down, and out.

And each of these four nights, he’s slept through till at least 5:45 a.m. About 11 hours without night waking (after we stopped going in at 4:30 a.m. on the second night).

In retrospect, I think this is how we went off the rails:

Putting him down without any rocking or singing involved letting him cry. We got sick of hearing him cry, fell back on our habit of rocking him to sleep. He was waking maybe once a night which was fine, especially when Scott was willing to give him a bottle and get him back down, and he was willing to take said bottle. Then his night waking started to increase in frequency over the course of an evening, but that seemed developmentally appropriate given the teething and learning to crawl and standing in his crib. Then our ability to get him to fall asleep, and fall back to sleep started falling apart. Then I panicked about letting him cry ever at all and started going to him whenever, giving him the boob if he seemed to want it. Especially because he seems like such a little guy, I was convinced that he was hungry. Then someone in my moms group said that at this age you’re supposed to respond to night waking because it’s separation anxiety. Which meant more nursing, soothing, etc.

Somewhere in there, I had also started letting the boy nurse himself to sleep. I think that was what finally derailed us. I’m no expert. I’m guessing here. It seems like after that, he was unable to fall asleep unless he nursed himself there. So, if he nursed and didn’t fall asleep, then he was frustrated, tired, and still awake. Which led to the sudden evolution of the late-night refusing to take the bottle and the three hour crying sessions broken up by nursing but not solved by nursing, in the wee hours.

Weissbluth says it’s okay to nurse to sleep but for us, at this age, that wasn’t the case. Mindell says if you let them nurse to sleep, they’ll wake themselves up later because they’ll rouse slightly over the course of a sleep cycle and be surprised at the boob’s seemingly sudden absence. That seemed true for Jonah as he’d begun waking 1-2 hours after nursing to sleep, which he’d never done before.

I can’t say exactly when, but in the midst of all this, the boy also started rejecting his pacifier. Just not into it anymore. He used to suck on it at various times throughout the day, as well as at night, during book time, but then he’d frequently spit it out to cry when we put him down in the crib anyway. So that may have led to more dependence on the boob…

There. I’m my own sleep consultant. I’ll just pay me that $125/hour fee. Actually, I owe part of that to all of you who have shared your stories and offered encouragement. And my pediatrician, whom I just decided to finally believe and do what she said.

Now naps are still elusive. I’m going to hold on to my little shred of faith that eventually those will come online, whether it’s two short or one long (cross fingers, knock wood).