We Sleep Through The Night

For over a month now, we've been able to sleep through the night! That's right, we have an almost 4 month old who sleeps from 7-9pm to 5-7am without waking up. Want to know how we did it, well read on.

Remember this post and this post about how hard it was to get him to go to sleep. I know that many of you are amazed at how this sleeping through the night is possible, so I'll give you some hints and explain about what we did.

From the very first time we brought Remington home, we wanted him to learn to sleep in his crib. I think co-sleeping is a great idea, but I'm too freaked out about SIDS to do it. We did try it twice, in desperation, but I still didn't get any sleep because I was too worried about rolling on top of him, or him smothering in the blankets or soft bed. The first couple weeks, Remington slept a lot (as newborns often do), but I still had to make sure to wake up every 3 hours to feed him. That was such a pain. We had to do that until he got back to his birth weight (and remember how hard that was). A side note: I started reading The Happiest Baby on the Block when I was pregnant, but I never finished it.

After he was able to be allowed to sleep through the night, he still woke up about every three hours to eat. When we switched to formula supplementing, he slept better because he seemed fuller. Formula also takes longer to digest. Soon, he was sleeping for 4 or 5 hours at a time. He wasn't always in the crib at this time, though, because sometimes we had to settle with the vibrator chair out of desperation, and we had trouble getting him to fall asleep before 10 or 11pm.

We tried everything. Some of them worked a night or two, while others didn't seem to make a difference.

• Cry it out did not work for me. I couldn't let him just scream, and I wasn't going to sleep like that anyway, so I might as well hold him. 

• Swaddling worked for a little bit, but Remington is so squirmy all the time, he eventually didn't like having his arms confined. 

• Giving him a bath before bed worked a little, but I didn't notice much difference if we didn't give him a bath a night.

• Lights out and silence really didn't work. He's too much like his parents. We may only have one child, but our house is super noisy and I have to have the radio on to fall asleep. Besides, we live in an old house with creaky floors. Every time we left the room, the floor creaking woke him up.

• The mobile worked a little bit. It gave him something to listen to and look at, but he would occasionally wake up when it shut off. (We had the Baby Einstein fish mobile.) He also tended to just watch it and not go to sleep, so we stopped that and fazed it out after the batteries died. We replaced the batteries a while later, but it didn't seem to make a difference for his sleep anymore. 

• The Wubbanub helped a little bit when he would wake up because he lost the pacifier. However, he moves his arms around too much when he's fighting going to sleep and would fling the Wubbanub away, so we just use regular pacifiers now (using pacifiers to sleep is supposed to help decrease SIDS).

• We also tried making the crib mattress softer/warmer. This freaked me out because, like I've said, I constantly worry about SIDs. It irritates me to no end when I see pictures of people's babies in cribs with blankets and toys thrown everywhere! Remington's crib is just the mattress and sheet, period. He sleeps in warm pajamas, and we have the temperature set in his room. We don't even use the bumpers, since they can be a SIDs hazard. Anyway, Landon folded up a blanket and put it under the sheet. It didn't seem to make a difference (at the time, Remington still didn't want to sleep in the crib), so we stopped that.

Here's what did work. To get him to sleep, we fed him and took him up to his room to hold and rock him to sleep. He would often fall asleep in our arms, but would wake up as soon as we put him down in the crib or the vibrating seat, or as soon as he lost his pacifier. We then tried laying down on the couch in his room with him tucked in our arm with the pacifier. He would fall asleep like that, lying pretty flat, so it was easier to transfer him to the vibrator chair or the crib.

Now we have a perfect system going on.

• First, he usually gets hungry around 6 or 7pm, so we feed him and change him. 
• Then, he is awake, alert, smiling, and playing for about 30 minutes to an hour. 
• He starts getting fussy and we change his diaper, put him in his pajamas, and feed him a little more. 
• Then, we hold him in our arms with the pacifier. He likes to be facing your chest (his stomach to our stomach- like they taught me to breastfeed) so that the pacifier stays in his mouth because you're there. He also likes to be patted on the butt and bounced a bit. 
• He might cry a bit or struggle against us, but usually he's barely able to keep his eyes open. It also helps to shush him to sleep when he's struggling (hold out the sh sound). He falls asleep like that with the TV blaring (primetime shows) and the lights on. 
• He lays asleep in our arms like that until 9pm. We take him up to his crib, lay him down, and he's good for the night.

So, good luck to all of you new parents. I hope you find a good system like we did, and I hope our systems lasts (I'm not looking forward to the growth spurts or teething).