I had twins, they were 6 weeks premature. One had severe colic and would only sleep laying on his stomach on one of us and the other simply would not sleep. These early infant behaviors continued to the 4 month point when I HAD to find a solution. I was at my wits end and spent hours on line researching, reading books, calling pediatricians and for the most part nothing was working.
I’d done the car thing, driving them around for hours. The washing machine thing too. Went through ALL the different types of bottles and ALL the types of formula. I even put mylicon in their bottles. I did hot water bottles, tummy vibrators, and bjorned it everywhere. NOTHING WORKED. It would once or twice and then would stop and I truly was about to lose my mind.
Physically I knew the colicky baby was improving, the behavior though wasn’t so with him I let him lie down on my stomach as I had always done prior to putting him down, only this time I picked a super soft satin blanket and had that inbetween me and him. Every time I soothed him for the next 24 hours, I kept that blanket there. I wanted him to associate the blanket with me. I wanted him to have some level of comfort for the difficult process of weaning him into a crib and putting himself to sleep. I knew it had to be done with this child as his habits were going to kill me. He would have to cry a bit but I felt better knowing that he had something offering comfort within his reach if he so needed it. I put him to bed with his blanket in his room , no laying on me at all. He cried for 2 minutes, I went and got him and calmed him down. I told him it was sleep time and we were going back to bed. I let him cry for 4 minutes before getting him. Then 6, then 8 and by 12 minutes he was asleep. This was hard listening to my baby cry. I had an egg timer with me and sat on the porch with the monitor. I believe I cried quite a bit as well.
The next night I did the same thing and at 4 minutes he was asleep!.. It stayed at about 4 minutes give or take a couple for about a week then VOILA, the child was trained to put himself to sleep. On occasion if he woke mid night, I would just start the process again. After illness, I have had to re do my program but it has never taken more than 4 minutes and 99.9% of the time, not a tear shed.
The other baby however is a completely different story. He couldn’t fall asleep. He’d scream and scream until he vomited every single day and night while he was with me. I knew he was tired but if I even walked into his room he’d go nuts. I dreaded 5 p.m. when he’d really get hysterical. Putting that child to bed was a process of jumping through so many hoops which we gladly did until they too stopped working. People told me to let him cry and I did try treating him like a regular baby who will fuss and then go to sleep but I knew deep down that would never work with him, he’d keep going until he died.
The solution was my chart. Not a sleep chart but an awake chart. If he woke up at 8:00 and I put him down at 11:00 for nap and he went nuts………3 hours awake was wrong for him. If I put him down at 11:30 instead and he showed signs of being tired like a yawn….I was really in trouble. I figured out real quick that if I saw a sign of fatigue, I had missed my window of opportunity. If I put him down at 10:30 instead and he fairly quickly went to sleep…..that taught me the child can only be awake for 2.5 hours in between naps. As he grew I did have to tweak his schedule a bit -10 minutes here or there but for the most part, he went from an over stimulated mess to a rather pleasant well rested baby. I wish I had found that information out there somewhere instead of the standard CIO recipe. Even at 2 months old, babies can be overstimulated and over tired.
I am happy to report both babies go to sleep nicely and I never let them simply cry themselves to sleep. I am leery of any “one recipe fits all” technique and I hope maybe this article helps save one persons sanity.