Ha!
Before you point out my hypocrisy and full-of-shitness, I will defend my choice. Firstly, the whole "I will play this whole parenting thing by ear and read no advice books" thing doesn't seem to be working screamingly well when it comes to sleepytime. It's not that Miles still wakes up a few times or sometimes takes a while to go down at night - that, by itself, I can handle. It's that he's 7 months old and is still sleeping like a 4 month old. That he's showing close to no signs of being able to move toward sleeping through the night on his own. I thought that if I was patient he would grow out of nursing 3-4 times a night on his own, but now I'm beginning to think that is not the case and he may need some nudging. When I read of mothers who are still nursing 3-4 times a night at 18 months I just know - that's not where I want to end up.
So why Dr. Sears, after I thoroughly thrashed him in my AP rant? Because I have pre-requisites about sleep advice. 1) I'm not ready to stop bed-sharing, 2) I can't deal with CIO techniques, 3) I'm not ready to wean or start formula. Those three caveats rule out pretty much every sleep advice book except for Sears's.
I've given the book the once-over and will have to comb through it a few more times before I can attempt to implement any new strategies. A lot of it is about having fathers take over the nighttime soothing, which won't work for us - Mr. Ibis is away three nights a week, and of the four nights he is here, he has to get up at 2 am for work on three of them. But there are some other ideas we can try. Sears seems to imply that if your baby is still comfort-nursing through the night at 9 months it's reasonable to try to night wean. I figure it's useless to start anything before our vacation since traveling will be crazy, but when we get back Miles will be closer to 9 months, so the timing should work well. For now I'm just going to peruse the book and look for patterns in Miles's naps, feedings, etc.
My goal in the near future is simply to get him down to one nighttime feeding. I think that's a reasonable standard for a 9 month old baby and would help everyone sleep better at night, including Miles. Come October we'll see if we can start working toward that.
1 comment:
I read the book and have to say it was the only baby sleep book I didn't scoff and curse at. I appreciated that he doesn't "punish" the parent for co-sleeping and not wanting to let your baby CIO. He reinforced evrything I wanted to hear about Jack's sleep habits. The book I hated most? The Baby Whisperer. I recommend reading it just so you can laugh and snarl at the author.
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