Sleep Issues

After receiving a LifeNudge™ from Daniel, I have decided to try and quit neglecting our blog. I’m going to try to start as far back as I can and remember some of the things that we learned and things I wish I would have known as we’ve made our way through the first year with Julian.

That being said, the first 5 months for us were some of the most trying months of our lives. Julian has never been an amazing sleeper from the get go and after him taking no more than 30 minute naps for 5 months it was beginning to be extremely frustrating. My friend Karen recommended 2 books. I think these books completely changed our lives. What worked for us was the transition from having absolutely no schedule or routine to establishing a fairly rigid routine.

The Contented Little Baby by Gina Ford was the first book we read. Since the book covers the first year of the baby’s life we really just skimmed the beginning and skipped ahead to the 4-5 month section. Over the next few days we adopted the suggested schedule. Almost immediately we noticed a substantial improvement in his behavior as well as longer nap times and better sleeping at night.

The Contented Little Baby helped us with the schedule however another problem we were having was we felt we had to bounce Julian to sleep and that was the only way he would ever fall asleep. We bought Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems by the controversial Dr. Ferber. We, like a lot of other people we know, thought that the cry-it-out method was not something we felt comfortable doing. We bought 2-3 other books of no cry solutions. However, nothing seemed to work. So, we started the cry-it-out method as described in Dr. Ferber’s book. Within days we saw huge results and Julian’s sleep has been dramatically improved as well as our quality of life since we’re both getting more than 2 hours of sleep at a time.