Ellie’s birthday is tomorrow, and as her gift to me, Ellie slept from 6:45-4:15 last night. It was amazing!
Sleep and babies is so so hard. And although we got off to a fantastic start with great habits, it was all ruined first by my surgery and again by Ellie’s skinny weight. But with Ellie reaching the 15th percentile earlier this month (which I attribute to her cream cheese sandwiches and starting her on formula) and watching her barely drink some of her nighttime bottles, we moved her to a new plan: a bottle at bedtime and a bottle at her midnight wake-up, nursing or rocking for the rest (my milk production has pretty much called it quits). For the first part of the month I was bringing her into bed with us after her second wake-up out of exhaustion and a serious loathing for getting out of bed in January when the thermostat is set to 59 degrees, but after this weekend when she randomly just had a giant fit for no reason Saturday night (crying, but didn’t want a bottle, didn’t want to nurse, didn’t want to be in bed with us, didn’t want to be rocked) I decided that she was ready for some tough love and I would deal with the consequences of a week or two of less comfort for a lifetime of more comfort. After all, she goes to sleep great on her own without crying, so she can do this! And funnily enough, that night was as much crying as we ever got—she’s been pretty awesome to ‘ferberize’—I think because she already has the skills to put herself to sleep and because she catches on to new rules pretty quick.
The rule this week has been ‘you get a bottle at midnight, then you go back in your crib and after that, if you wake up you just get checked on and your music turned on.’ The first night was great—she woke up at 12:00 on the dot, got her bottle. Then she woke up at 2:00. I visited her and left. She cried. For all of 5 minutes. And then she didn’t wake up until 7:00. JUST the kind of result I needed to know this would work and work quickly! Monday and Tuesday night we repeated the formula—12:00 wakeup, bottle, then back in the crib. Wakeup at 2 or 3, visit from me, music turned on. Crying stopped by the time I made it back to my bed. She’s a smart girl—she got the new rules.
I told Nic that I was trying to teach her that one wake-up is worth it if she needs that bottle to get through the night, but the rest she shouldn’t even bother.
And last night she skipped the midnight feeding! She gulped that bottle at 4am, so I’m not sure we can stretch her out to 6 or 7 without a feeding, but 9 uninterrupted hours of sleep is certainly a record for Miss Eloise! (And makes me wish I’d gone to bed at 6:45 when she did!)
