CIO: Days 1 and 2

Our champion sleeper has been somewhat less of a champ lately. Grace has been waking a lot during the night and fussing (ok, raging) as well as waking earlier in the morning. Sometimes she cries for a few minutes and goes back to sleep and other times, we're not so lucky. We've let her cry a few times, but realized that it's time to be consistent and play hardball. It's interesting because as awful as it is, it also seems like she's ready for it. She wants to be picked up and cuddled and has a fit when put down, but she doesn't need anything specific (i.e., she's not hungry or in pain as far as we can tell) so it seems like it's time to work harder at the self-soothing.

She generally goes down well in the evening, but then wakes during the night. So, starting Sunday we've been letting her cry and trying to resist the temptation to just give her the pacifier so all three of us can go back to sleep. Sunday went pretty well - she woke twice, but got back to sleep on her own, and didn't get up to eat until sometime maybe 5:30am. Not bad - that's a ten hour night for her. Now, just because she's going back to sleep doesn't mean I'm going back to sleep...

Monday night, not quite so smooth. Two wake ups in which she quickly went back to sleep after crying a few minutes. Bonus was that I went back to sleep also. However, she woke a third time and was really raging. We waited it out a good 20 minutes (we're actually not that wimpy - one time last week we let her cry for 40 minutes), but we started to hear our neighbors making noise so we were worried she was keeping them awake. Steve went to her to soothe her and give her the binky and she went back to sleep for another hour. All in all, I guess this is pretty good, but I'm not sure how we'll go forward if we have a complaint from the neighbors. However, these particular neighbors I just dare to come and complain... we've been listening to them scream over football/baseball/basketball games for two and a half years, plus they run around in high heels and throw marbles on the floor all the time, and apparently have a fetish for furniture assembly in the middle of the night. But I digress.

Anyway, here's hoping that night three is the charm and we're done with CIO and Grace becomes a fantastic sleeper. We should be so lucky. However, so many friends have told me that crying it out was really hard when they did it, but paid off with a happy, healthy, good sleeper. It must be done and so we continue.