Sleep

I am lying in bed snuggled up with two sleeping babies. I love being their source of comfort and security, but there's also part of me that wonders if I'm doing the right thing by co-sleeping. I swore that by 6 months we would make the transition to their cribs.

Part of me wants my bed back. I want to be able to roll over and not disturb a sleeping baby. I want to be able to spread out and not worry about if my pillow is too close to someone's face. The other part of me wants to soak up every single minute of this I can. I know they won't be this small forever. I love rubbing their little heads while they sleep. I love feeling the weight of them on my chest. Eventually it will end, but when is the right time and how should we go about it?

There seem to be two main camps when it comes to sleep training. Those who believe in CIO, cry it out, and those who are anti-CIO. I fall somewhere in the middle. I've read "The No Cry Sleep Solution" by Elizabeth Pantley and it offers some wonderful advice, a lot of which we're using. I've also researched the PUPD, pick up put down, method. We tried it, and after 2 hours of picking up Harrison and putting him back down, I gave up and let him come back to bed. We also tried a modified CIO. That was a disaster too. I am only willing to let my babies cry for so long. Some of the CIO supporters says it's ok to let your baby cry for hours. Will they eventually learn to soothe themselves and sleep through the night if I don't train them to do so?

I don't know what is going to work for us, but in talking to other moms I do know this: The majority of babies don't sleep through the night at 4 or 6 months. There are also a lot more moms that co-sleep than what you might think.

After contemplating how to move forward with our family's sleep arrangement for a couple weeks I've come to a decision. We are going to continue co-sleeping for the time being. I'm not ready to give it up. I am however ready to stop nursing a baby back to sleep every hour, so we are going to focus on breaking our dependence on nursing to sleep.

I'm sure H and B could go all night without nursing, but we're going to start by getting them back to only nursing every three hours. From there we'll try stretching it to four and then to six hours. They used to go five or six hours between nursing at night, so I know they can do it now. We'll be comforting them back to sleep with patting, shushing, snuggling and even a little bouncing in bed.

Last night was our first night trying this and there were definitely a few tears. No one cried for more than a few minutes though, and we were always right there to
soothe them, even if it wasn't their preferred method of soothing. I'm hoping there will be less crying and waking tonight. They're asleep now and I'm on my own tonight for the first few hours. I'm going to roll out of bed and hopefully get to enjoy a hot chocolate, my DVR and some dog snuggles.