Not many will find this post interesting, but it is a necessary update in my life.
The last ~5 weeks have been very difficult. A typical night goes like this:
- 7:30pm – Put Harrison down to sleep
- 8:30pm – Go sleep ourselves
- 11:00pm – Harrison wakes up to feed
- 11:30pm – Put him back down
- 1:00am – Harrison wakes up to feed
- 1:30am – Put him back down
Then all hell breaks loose.
Starting between 2 and 3am, Harrison will not sleep in the crib for more than 30-45 minutes at a time. He starts crying and one of us has to hold him. So we hold him for 10 minutes and put him back in the crib. Sometimes he sleeps for 45 minutes and sometimes for 45 seconds. It’s an anxiety-ridden, delirious stretch of night when you can barely remember what happened 10 minutes ago. I would estimate between 2:30am and 6:30am (when we normally wake up), we each sleep for ~two hours.
So in total, between the 10 hour stretch of 8:30pm and 6:30am, we average probably 5.5 – 6 hours of sleep. There is not much life to be lived on the weekdays when you’re stumbling through that way, despite Harrison being a joy during the stretches that he’s awake.
As he just turned four months old, he’s eligible for ‘sleep training’. It sounds fancy, but it’s literally just “put him in the crib and let him cry until he falls asleep“. After a brutal week, we gave it a try on Friday night. Friends had told us their baby cried for 84 minutes straight before falling asleep on the first night. We crossed our fingers.
We put him down and 19 minutes later, he was asleep. This is a good start! But our real obstacle had been throughout the night, not just getting him down. The rules say that if it’s been less than three hours since his last feed and he wakes up crying, you just let him cry.
This happened 2 or 3 times throughout the night. We let him cry and every time he fell back asleep within 5-10 minutes.
We had two 4 hour stretches of sleep on night one. It was incredible.
Last night we put him down around the same time and SEVEN minutes later, he was asleep. Very similar night, a few wake ups, but Meg and I got 7-8 hours of sleep both nights.
This is a game changer. I have time and energy now to run, blog, make pancakes, get my money back from Robbie Star at Superstar Track Records. It feels like I’m in a pharmacy commercial!
There’s really not much more to this post than documenting the challenges of the last month and the joy in little things.
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