Starting with the 4 month sleep regression both girls started waking up at night a lot more. Alessandra would put herself to sleep easily at night and for naps. Audri went the opposite way and needed more and more rocking and holding to fall asleep.  It got to be such a process to get her to sleep because she couldn't self soothe. And she was crying and fussing a lot anyway so I figured sleep training was worth a shot.

I started reading a lot about sleep training and found a method that wasn't as drastic and a total cry it out. It's from the book "The Sleep Easy Solution." Basically it combines dream feeds, slowly weaning night feeds, and controlled crying with check ins. The other key is to never feed them when they wake up crying, only do dream feeds.  We started it on Thursday night. Audri cried for 50 minutes the first night.

I thought I was going to cry myself... I felt so bad.  But then she fell asleep and woke up 4 times throughout the night, each time crying less. The second night she cried for 10 minutes, woke up twice. The 3rd night- no crying and slept from 12-5:45 with no feeds! I can't believe how well it worked!!!  We still have a few more nights but I'm really excited about the progress. We're dropping the middle of the night feed for Alessandra tonight so we'll see how it goes. Hopefully within a week or two we'll be down to just one night dream feed and they'll sleep 6-11, dream feed, and then sleep until 6am!