This weekend was one full of loooong nights … in a not-so-good way. Coco was having another one of her “I refuse to go to bed when you want me to” spells. Friday, Saturday and Sunday night were all rife with screaming, crying, flailing, hitting, etc. And that was just Mommy. Cora, who normally knows her bedtime routine well and is nodding off in my arms by the time I lay her in her crib, was refusing to have anything at all to do with sleep.
On Friday we decided maybe our Cry It Out approach was harsh and tried to give in and go with the flow, letting her come back downstairs to watch TV with us hoping she'd just nod off on her own and we could softly carry her up to her crib. Yeah, that did NOT work. Finally at 9:00pm we had to just make her go to bed and cry it out some.
On Saturday, determined that she would not “win” and that we would demonstrate our parental determination, we decided if she did not go down easily, we would simply let her cry it out. That took about an hour and a half of crying (her and I) before the poor little thing finally just passed out in her crib.
On Sunday, we tried a combined approach. We would let her cry for about 10 minutes (while standing up at the end of her crib yelling) and then would go in, lay her back down, firmly tell her it was “night night time”, give her a kiss and leave the room. Again this went on for an extended period of time until we again finally just made her cry it out on her own.
The entire weekend we tried and tried to figure out what could be wrong that was causing all the fuss. Other than her being off her routine of going to her daycare during the week we could find nothing. So last night we tried what I like to call the Pasta Approach… i.e. throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Here is what we went with:
- Teething tablets when she got home from daycare (she is getting her back molars)
- More solid dinner (Graduates turkey sticks and pear bits instead of baby food)
- Lighter spring jammies instead of her microfleece ones
- Tylenol at bedtime
- No milk that day (we’d been working on giving her whole milk with lunch to start the formula weaning process this weekend)
- I rocked her longer (30 mins total) and waited until her eyes were drooping before putting her down
The good news is that something worked…. She went to sleep just fine and slept through the night. We had our baby back! The bad news is that something worked – but we have no idea what. Argh. So we win the battle of getting a good night’s sleep, but we lose the war of knowing what the problem was to begin with. Now we’ll have to go little by little with the changes we were trying to make and hope for the best. Whoever coined the term “slept like a baby” should be sued for false advertising.
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