Adventures in Sleep Training
Hannah’s favorite place to sleep… on me after nursing (not really conducive to getting anything else done)
Up until Hannah was about 4 months old, she slept incredibly well. We could put her in the crib, or really anywhere, and she'd be out like a light. Given the (very minimal) amount I know about baby sleep, this makes sense... sleep early on tends to be easier to come by than sleep later on.
We were regularly getting 6-8 hour nights and it was amazing. Then, we went to her 4 month doctor’s visit and everything went out the window. She'd wake multiple times a night to feed (despite being very well fed), she would only nap while nursing on me, and would scream if we put her down awake in her crib. We chalked it up to her being an infant and went on with our lives. I was home, Mike's work schedule isn't too terrible, and Ellie was at school during the day, so we managed.
When my return to work was fast approaching and I was lucky to get a 30 minute nap out of her while nursing and we were waking up 2-3 times a night, I started to get really nervous that things were not going to magically improve (like I figured they would, ha!). A tenure track job in and of itself is challenging, add in sleep deprivation and it becomes nearly impossible. So... we decided to do some sleep training.
I thought I'd share what we did (and are still doing) in case anyone else is in the same boat as us and interested in how things went. I can't tell you how many times I googled “sleep training a 6 month old” or “how to get your 7 month old to take long naps” in the past few months.
Age started
Just over 6 months. We had a cross country trip planned when Hannah was 5.5 months and wanted to wait until we were back and settled before we started sleep training.
Tools/resources used
White noise: a box fan and a white noise machine. The white noise machine is right next to her crib and the box fan is in the room for naps and then outside the door at bedtime.
Blackout curtains and cardboard in the windows of the bedroom. Not sure the cardboard is actually doing anything but we’re too tired to take it down.
A winter weight sleep sack (our house gets cold). We're using the Zen Sack by Nested Bean for the heavy sleep sack and have a lighter weight one for slightly warmer temps (plus a few Halos). The Zen Sack is expensive and I'm not sure the little added weights actually do anything but I do like how warm the winter one is and how easy it is to put on.
A video monitor
Precious Little Sleep book
The internet... so much searching
Naps/nights timing
We worked on nights first. While we were working on nights, I napped Hannah during nursing sessions to make sure she was getting good sleep at some point during the day. We tackled naps after nights felt solid. I wouldn’t say that naps are figured out yet, they are still very much a work in progress. She can put herself down independently but we can’t get her past the 30 minute mark without holding/nursing her (and sometimes that doesn’t even work).
General strategy
There's lots of terminology that gets thrown around in the sleep training internet world. If you've read the Precious Little Sleep book, we started with “Fuss It Out” at night (which is essentially like cry it out, except you only let them cry for 15 minutes and stop after a week if it's not working). And then for naps we did “cry it out” or “crib hour” or whatever you want to call it... we put her in her crib and shut the door for an hour (though now we’re at a point where if she doesn’t fall asleep in about 20-30 minutes we’ll go in and help her out because it doesn't seem to impact her other sleep anymore).
Looking back on the past 56 days (but who’s counting), here are a few things that stand out to me that really seemed to impact Hannah’s sleep.
Digestion! We started solids shortly before we started sleep training and unfortunately Hannah got super constipated which made her uncomfortable and really seemed to mess with her sleep.
Developmental milestones. Hannah started crawling a few weeks into sleep training which meant that she’d be in her crib, rocking back and forth on her hands and knees screaming because she was tired but also wanting to practice crawling. She also started babbling more and we’re pretty sure she’s saying the word “cat” or more like “ca” whenever she sees our cat. And most recently she’s started pulling to stand, which has probably been the most disruptive of the milestones (and I think we’re still seeing the effects of it now). Whenever a new skill emerges (which feels like everyday) her sleep is terrible... fun times.
Number of naps. I think we tried to hold onto 3 naps for longer than we needed to. Ellie was always an early nap dropper and Hannah is following suit. When we kept getting short cap naps during the day we cut them down to two and that seemed to help lengthen them a bit (though we still haven’t been able to get past 30 minutes).
Our ability to keep her on a regular schedule. It was easy to keep Ellie on a schedule because it was just her, and Mike wasn’t working. Now that Ellie is in school and Mike is working part time, we don’t have the luxury of scheduling our day around Hannah’s sleep which means that naps get shortened (or skipped) and bed time can fluctuate by a fair amount... which then impacts the next day’s sleep.
If you want to see a log of her sleep, click here. It includes 33 days of nap and sleep times and some notes about what happened. After 33 days of tracking, I called it quits.
Overall, it took...
9 days until she went down at night with minimal crying
11 days until she was sleeping through the night (~9 - 11 hours consistently)
12 days until we got our first independent 30 minute nap (granted, the 2nd time we got a 30+ independent nap was on day 23, so there’s little consistency with this)
26 days until she napped independently with minimal crying (ugh)
31 days until she napped for an hour on her own (and we’ve only got 1 other hour+ nap since that time, 56 days in...)
Where are we now?
Pretty sure we’re solidly in the 8-month sleep regression. She’s been waking up in the middle of the night on a consistent basis (around 3am). She can sometimes get herself back down, other times Mike will go in, usually after giving it at least an hour, to see if she’ll sleep in his arms until sometime in the 6 o’clock hour when I do the first feeding of the day.
Bedtime is still really good, she goes down most nights with little to no crying. She’s doing 2 naps a day, both around 30 minutes each, which is way too short… not that Hannah seems to be negatively impacted by it, she’s quite pleasant, it’s just way to short for the well-being of the adults in the house! Fingers crossed that once her brain calms down from all the standing her sleep will settle again. Overall, sleep is worlds better than it was before, especially the independent sleep part of things.