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
I'm just wondering- when you eventually started doing Babywise with your first, what specifically did you do/change? I had read Babywise before my son came and was all on board and I thought I was implementing it- but I was not getting the results I hear talked about. I was doing the eat/wake/sleep cycles, I was trying to do full feedings. But he just really struggled with sleep (specifically going to sleep and sleeping long enough). I'm just wondering what was key for you in transforming your baby using Babywise. -Jolene
Sounds like I need this book. I'm expecting my first in September and everyone's horror stories are freaking me out!
From Elleisson: Hi "Unknown", How old is your child now? When I started with my first child as indicated in the story, I specifically worked on getting space between his feedings. I didn't do cry-it-out right away as I wanted to get the feeding right. I honestly thing he was/is a child that loved routine. The feedings were the key with him. I did cry-it-out with him when he was 5 months old. Before that time I rocked him to sleep and he always slept through and did fairly well with naps. Overall, I would say my son and Babywise were amazing together. When I did Babywise with my 2nd child, it worked well too, but she didn't take to it as well as my first in the sleep department. I worked on cry-it-out with her earlier, but it took a really long time to get consistent night time sleep with her. Her naps were long, but getting her to sleep was a struggle. With my daughter, Babywise was wonderful too, but it wasn't the "by the book results" like my son was. It was definitely more work to try and implement the concepts with her. I am expecting my 3rd in November, so I am curious to see how this one does with Babywise. After my experience with both of my children, I have just concluded that some babies will fight sleep more than others and some will love routines more than others. Now that my children are 4 and almost 2 I can really see their personality coming out. My son adapts to things more easily and willingly and my daughter is more determined to hold out for what she wants with amazing strength. This determination definitely added a challenge when she was smaller. I used to stress out if my babies didn't do exactly what the book said they should be doing at certain ages, but I learned that the books has wonderful guidelines and even if you do everything "by the book", some babies will want to do things on their own time table.
Elleisson- (and if you could comment too, Valerie)My son is now 11 months. And we still struggle with sleep. Thankfully bedtime has been pretty good for quite a while, but at around 6 months, I had to just stop feeding at night to get him to sleep through the night. And naps have always been up and down. But then, it took me several months to really be okay with cry-it-out. And I wonder if I had started that much earlier if things would have been really different? Or maybe not. That and at around 6 months I tried to really push a schedule (we kind of had a schedule, but more like "cycles" because his naps never were long enough to make the schedule). So I guess I'm wondering, with the next child, if cry-it-out early and really setting a firm schedule is "the answer" or if I just was blessed with a little man who is really stubborn about sleep? Or both? 🙂 -Jolene
Jolene it could be both. I like to start young just so they don't learn one way to sleep and then have to re-learn a new way. My babies that I have started right from the hospital never actually had to really CIO–they just fell asleep on their own.Part of it is just gaining experience and recognizing when a baby needs to nap and trusting that a baby needs to sleep ALL THE TIME.You should check out the Baby Whisperer's first book and read about personality types (you can see some info on my blog about it–go to the blog index and look under Baby Whisperer). That will give you an idea how much of it is his natural disposition and how much is what he learned.