When I was expecting my first child, I was very confident, as I had so much experience with babies. Then I had my own…wow, things are sure different when you are the mother. I had attended a prenatal class before giving birth and their solution to pretty much every problem is to just nurse your baby. With advice like that to start out, it isn’t a wonder I ran in to trouble very quickly. My son usually did fairly well with night time sleep or so I thought. I was up with him 3 or 4 times in the night, but I thought that was pretty good at the time. It was the days that got me. After week one he was very very cranky and cried and cried. So having only been told to nurse him, that is what I would do. It seemed like all I did was nurse him. Very quickly I was exhausted, I was still recovering from a C-section and looking after my child that cried so much. Needless to say the first 6 weeks were unbelievably hard. A friend of my mother’s, who had 7 children heard about my dilemma. She sent over the book “On Becoming Babywise” and said that this was my solution and that is what she used. She had remarkably wonderful calm children. I remember thinking that if my child could turn out just 1/2 as nice as her children, I would be happy. So I had the book, but how was I going to read it with my crying child. I sat and cried and cried. My husband said he would take our son on a long car ride, so I could read the book. He pulled out of the yard and I started speed reading the book. He was back in about 2 hours, but I had already enough to get a game plan ready for the next day. I snuck in reading whenever I could. By simply following the eat/wake/sleep pattern, I was shocked to have a happy, giggling, contented boy on my hands just 3 days later. He was so happy. I had be doing everything wrong. It made so much sense. He started sleeping 8 hours at night at 13 weeks. I have never looked back and have been loaning out my book to others since. I successfully used it with my second child and intend on using it with any other future children. It brought such calm and peace into our household. I can’t stop telling people how wonderful it is.
Elleisson
Son, May 2010
Daughter, August 2012
One more on the way, November 2014
