Our Sleep Training Experience

Just wanted to share what we did to improve our son’s sleep in case anyone is considering (gentle) sleep training. However I am definitely NOT pushing it on anyone and respect the choice not to do formal sleep training, especially since I never thought I would.

Bennett is now 5 months and a week old... there were a few nights around 2-3 months old where he only woke up twice at night, but on average he was up every 1-3 hours. Starting at about 4 months old, he was also impossible to get back to sleep once he woke up... sometimes it would take up to 5 rocking attempts. This also created a bad habit of giving him a bottle at every wake up; eventually he was consuming almost half of his calories in the middle of the night.

Ever since he was very small I would try to “lay him down drowsy” and it would work maybe 50% of the time or less. But it didn’t translate to him sleeping longer stretches, even naps could be just 10-30 minutes.

I never thought I’d do any type of crying sleep training method, but as he was approaching 5 months mine and my husband’s mental and physical health were really impacted. We both work 9-10 hour days and, at least for me, the brain fog was impacting my performance and mood with my patients.

Anyways, we decided on the Ferber Method. However, I did not want to endure crying for more than 10 mins.... luckily I didn’t have to! I also didn’t want to hold back milk if he was truly hungry so we decided that if he was still crying after 3 check ins or if his cry was different, we’d feed him once calm.

Night 1: 45 mins to fall asleep and 6 wake ups

-the 45 mins was mostly rolling around and not much crying, 3 check ins (3, 5, 10 mins). 2 feedings needed.

Night 2: 20 mins to fall asleep, 5 wake ups

-no feedings needed

Night 3: 3 mins to fall asleep, 3 wake ups

-1 feeding needed

Night 4: 3 mins to fall asleep, slept through the night (woke up at 10:30 but soothed self in 3 mins and woke up earlier than usual at 5:45am) no feedings needed

Naps are also taking less than 5 mins to fall asleep as long as we follow wake times.

I know some experiences can be much more awful, but I guess you never know until you try. I hope it keeps up like this! We already feel a million times better and Bennett must feel good too with better quality sleep.

Let me know if anyone has questions!