Sleep training

I’ve posted on here about sleep training and seem to get a lot of questions on how I did it so I’m just going to share my story.

Backstory: my son was a good sleeper from the beginning. I was able to rock him to sleep and place him in his pack and play next to our bed without a peep. Starting around 3.5 months, we hit the 4 month sleep regression early and he started waking up every 1.5-2 hours throughout the night, and we started co sleeping to survive but that didn’t help, he was still waking up often like that. I kept waiting for it to pass but after over a month of waking up like that and trying and buying everything I possibly could, I decided to sleep train.

We decided to do a modified Ferber. His bedtime is 7:00-8:00pm( depending on naps), we practice eat play sleep(doesn’t always work in my favour but we try to at least feed 20 minutes before sleeping so he doesn’t associate needing to eat to sleep), and we follow awake times of not keeping him up past 2.5 hours. I also decided to do nights first and worry about naps later cause I didn’t want him overtired before bed which can prolong the crying. I decided that if he woke up anytime in the middle of the night and cried longer than 10-15 minutes and it was more than 2 hours since his last feeding, that I would feed him.

I say modified Ferber because I didn’t follow the check in times to a T. If he was scream crying, I had a hard time waiting for the timer to go to 0. And if he was settling and I went to check in, he’d escalate again so I decided not to go in if his cry wasn’t intense.

Night 1: 30 minutes of on and off crying. No check ins. Slept from 8-12, 12-4, 4-7.

Night 2: Was super overtired this night due to having a late dinner and missed a nap at a friends house and it was super hard. He cried for 40 minutes, we did 4 check ins(I picked him up twice which is a big no no but honestly it felt right to me), he slept from 8:00-2:30, than 2:30-5 am. This night sucked, baby was overtired so I highly recommend to try and stay home during sleep training.

Night 3: 10 minutes of crying, no check ins, and slept from 8:00-4:00, than 4:10-8;30!

After that, he slept pretty consistently from 8:30pm-8:30 am with one feeding at 5;30 am.

We did have a burst night where he cried on and off for an hour. We’ve also had to tweak his “schedule”(we follow a loose one) a lot during this time. He was transitioning from 4 to 3 naps so that made things harder, as he needed more awake time and it was hard to find that sweet spot of awake time between the last nap and bed.

Since than, he’s transitioned to 3 naps(which are still only 30 minutes-1 and a half hours), his bedtime has moved up to 7:00-7:30 pm which I was terrified of cause I was scared he would wake up early but now I wish I would have done it earlier because he’s now sleeping 13 hours straight with no feedings so I’m a firm believer that sleep begets sleep and he’s definitely making up for the short naps during the night. And he only cries 5 minutes before going to bed.

It was hard but worth it. I’m going to do nap training at 6 months when he’s down to 2 so I don’t have advice on naps.

Edit: I just wanted to add since this is a common question I get too. I did sleep train with the pacifier & I did replace it with check ins, BUT only because he doesn’t have a habit of needing it replaced all night. Now he spits it out soon after going in the crib and just falls asleep without it.