If they bite, squeeeeeeeze them tight--
They won't bite tomorrow night.
For some reason, this is the song we sing to the Bear every night when we put him to bed. As EJP pointed out to us, whoever wrote that song clearly does not know a lot about getting rid of bedbugs. (I hear the only way to get rid of those suckers is to burn them!)
So, besides teaching our child ineffectual pest removal techniques, we are sure to keep the same bedtime routine each night. This is to ensure that the little guy continues to be lazy a great sleeper, just like his mommy. And, honestly? It works! (Well, so far anyway). I entirely credit the book The Sleepeasy Solution, lent to us by friends when I found the Weissbluth and Ferber books to be too textbooky (and, if you know me, you know that textbooks were never exactly my favorite things to read. or things i read at all, if I'm being truthful). From what I can gather, all three advocate the same technique: cry it out (known in mom circles as CIO). It's just that the Sleepeasy book gets right down to the how-to and give great sample timelines and has downloadable charts and other things to make you think there's a method to it all. Which, importantly, gives you* something to keep you busy when your baby is *screaming* in his crib as you ignore his wail.
For us, CIO started right when the baby turned four months old. J was completely against unprepared for this endeavor, which he considered to be unbearably mean. But being home with the baby all day, I knew that he was simply not getting enough good sleep. He had been a five/six/seven hour sleeper when he was younger, but had steadily been decreasing his sleep intervals and increasing the time he'd stay awake in between. It was *not* cool. The happiest baby on the block (also a decent help in the early days of Bear) was becoming a bit of a crankypants. And, as I tell the baby when it happens, there's nothing cool about a little boy who whines. So onto sleep training-- with a lot of help/encouragement from our neighbor, who'd just sleep trained her son, we put him down the first night after a routine of bath, bottle, book, bed.
Now, up to this point, putting the baby to bed involved feeding or nursing the baby to sleep and then, like a high stakes game of Jenga, trying to place him in the crib and extricate one's arms without waking the baby. He had *zero* ability to self-soothe to sleep. With sleep training, we now had to do the opposite-- be sure to keep the baby 100% awake, albeit drowsy, until it was time to put him down and then leave him in the crib to put himself to sleep. We used white noise in the room too, so that he'd start to associate that noise with sleep time (and also to block out the ambient noise in the apartment, such as me shouting at J to come watch Little Miss Perfect or Toddlers and Tiaras with me NOW!) And, then starts the hard part.
Listening to the baby cry and cry and cry, and get the hiccups from crying, and then cry some more, while he waits for you to come back in and soothe him to sleep. With the Sleepeasy book, we were allowed to go back in at set, increasing intervals and let the Bear know that we were there, we loved him and all was ok. But we could not pick him up or hold him. (Then if he woke in the middle of the night, repeat the same process.) And then, you know, just keep yourself busy in the meantime, watch tv, read a book, just hang out, oblivious to the fact that your child is screaming bloody murder in the next room (since we could clearly hear him during all this, I took the liberty of shutting off the sound on the baby monitor because, in case you thought otherwise, screaming baby in stereo is actually horrible to listen to).
Another technique you'll be advised to employ, if you're a mom, is to "take a walk outside and let the dad stay with him, if you feel like you're compelled to go into the baby's room and pick him up." These people are unaware of my husband, Tenderheart Bear, who--immediately upon my exit from the apartment--would have that crying baby out of the crib, being held and, more importantly, having his crying behavior reinforced with the reward of getting picked up.
Well, the first night, the initial crying lasted (on and off) for an hour and forty minutes. There were also one or two wakeups during the night, one lasting over an hour. The next he cried less but still woke a couple of times. The third night? He cried for less than twenty minutes. And by the fourth night he was going down with only a tiny fuss and sleeping through the night with, also, only a short-lived fuss here and there that lasted for so short a time, we I didn't even need to go into his room to do the "it's ok, baby" interval training.
And after a week, he was sleeping from 7:30pm or so until 8am every night. No wakeups. Moreover, he was (and is) wayyyyyyyyy more pleasant to be around and more pleased with everything he does. If I could marry the Sleepeasy Solution, I would so do so. (And I can't thank Danielle and Dan enough for putting that book in our hands!) That's right, that baby's sleep is tiiiiiiiiight.
* That's the general "you", by the way. My heart of stone allowed me to get through the CIO nights without much trouble; just a little guilt born of haters who told me what I was doing was heartless. Bourbon got J through it, and me sending him out on various errands during prime cry-time also helped.
