Sleeping Like A Baby

Over the past few days, we’ve been trying to teach Tristan how to go to sleep on his own. We waited significantly longer with Connor to do this and we learned our lesson. When Connor was a year old, the only way he would go to sleep is if someone was holding him while walking and simultaneously patting his bottom. So we decided that it was time for Tristan to learn how to sleep. The previous method for Tristan was taking him upstairs, baby classical music CD, baby massage, clean diaper and pj’s. Then paci in mouth he would lay in the crib while I patted his bottom until he fell asleep.
Since we’ve started his sleep training, I’ve gained an hour of my life back. But it’s not the hour of quality time I was hoping for. This is mainly because Tristan is relentless with his screaming. We are doing the check on method, where we let him cry for 5 minutes, then 10, then 15 and so on, but in the end, he just screams until he passes out. And since we’ve started his sleep training, he’s started waking up again at midnight, 2am, 4am and 6am. Where as before we had an entire week where he slept from 8 until 6am. And now he has a cold.
Which makes us feel just awful putting him down and letting him cry when he doesn’t feel well. So we’ve been cuddling him a little bit more and listening to the screaming a little bit less. The screaming sessions are starting to get a little shorter though, tonight he cried for only ten minutes and I checked him after the first five so we are seeing an improvement.
Slowly but surely… we will all be sleeping like babies.