We finally broke down and decided to do "cry it out" with the girls.. That is, when they wake up and cry at night, after 10 minutes of crying, we go in there, pick them up for a minute to comfort them, then put them back in their bed and leave. We were always nervous about doing it before and worried about letting them cry so much. I kept hoping they would somehow start to magically sleep through the night without us having to do anything. But that sure wasn't happening, in fact they were getting worse, waking up multiple times a night, sometimes refusing to go back to their crib, therefore ending up in our bed. They almost always woke up an hour or two after going to bed too, sometimes every hour before 12am.. Which was a little draining not to mention really testing our patience! It's a lot harder to be patient at night!
After reading books and many websites about sleep, and speaking to people about it, I came to the conclusion that cry-it-out seems to always end up working, but it can be difficult on the parents, because you have to listen to your baby cry and not go to her immediately, which is basically what we had always done. But one day I just decided that I had enough of all this broken up sleep, babies in our bed, and breastfeeding numerous times a night. We gave up pacifiers a few weeks ago, so when they woke up I basically ALWAYS had to breastfeed them for them to go back to sleep, which was very draining physically and mentally! So I told Prosanta we would be letting them "cry it out" and I wasn't going to nurse them at night anymore. We knew they weren't waking because of hunger, since they sometimes did sleep all night.
So that was that. First night, Chaya woke up a few hours into the night and cried 30 minutes, we went in every 10 minutes, and she eventually went back to sleep! Anjali woke up a few hours later, we had to change her poopy diaper so it woke her up, she cried about 45 minutes. And they both slept until past 7am the next morning!!!
The second night we didn't have to go see them because they fell asleep on their own before the 10 minutes were up. Each of them has slept through the night a few times too! We are so excited about this, we can finally sleep!!! Chaya is still sleeping in a pack n play in another room, we will move her back in her crib once they don't wake up as much.. Really looking forward to both girls sleeping through the night most nights, in the SAME room!
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| Anjali sleeping on her new elephant pillow (early birthday present from mommy and daddy) |
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| Chaya sleeping folded in half, resting her head on her feet.. she napped like this for over an hour! |
