We just had our Thanksgiving Day weekend in Canada, but our weekend was not the typical Thanksgiving Day weekend you would expect with loads of Turkey. No, we spent most of the weekend in “sleep training”. What is sleep training you ask? Yes, we were training our little 15 month old boy to sleep through the night. It seems that Rhianna and I have been blessed with kids that did not sleep through the night till well after 1 year of age. I believe I mentioned this issue once or twice before. Our little boy not sleeping through the night was manageable for a while, but eventually all that sleep deprivation starts to catch up.
It is the worst for Rhianna, who went back to work full-time in June. Three plus months of work and sleep deprivation have made her extremely miserable and barely functioning. This sorry state has pretty much put everything else on hold till we get our little one sleeping through the night. Previous efforts to get him to sleep through the night usually ended with him screaming his head off. The boy was not very cooperative……he seems to like the boobies too much. I can’t fault him for that!
As far as sleep training goes, we are not really into the cry it out method or Ferberizing our kids. We have followed a lot of advice from Dr. Sears’s books on child rearing. We have great results with the oldest using this method, so no need to change that. But now is the time to get the boy sleeping through the night. Everyone is on edge and we really need to move on. He is old enough and there is no real reason why he should not be sleeping through the night by now. From now on I will be staying with him at night. Well, at least that is the plan!
Over the past weekend, I have been putting him to sleep for naps and then I stayed with him the last two nights. Rihanna, will now sleep in another room. I think Rhianna is ecstatic at the prospect of getting her first uninterrupted night of sleep in 15 months. All is going quite well so far. Last night the boy slept 8 hrs last night without waking up or even crying. I believe that is a new record! Should the success continue throughout the week, we should be able to celebrate by the weekend.
The future looks promising. When our oldest started sleeping through the night, life started anew. We were able to get out a few times a month and have some fun. We are certainly expecting this will be the case again when boy starts sleeping though the night. He is doing great in every other respect, so he should do just fine. We have been looking forward to this for quite some time. As a bonus, I should be able to devote a bit more time to this blog in the coming months by adding more content, as well as writing about the new erotic adventures that we are hoping to have.
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Yikes. I had mine sleeping through the night by 6 weeks! Of course a few wakeful nights a month weren’t unheard of though.