Welcome Back, Ferber

We started sleep training Savannah last night.

She's a good sleeper, but had some picky habits about how she would fall asleep. Like only with a pacifier. While being held. And rocked. And patted. For half an hour. Or maybe more.

It was wearing us out. And because she's already a little mama's girl, her falling asleep issues were making it really difficult for me to get any time away. (And you know I need my time away.)

With Chelsea, sleep training was salvation and sanity. Before training, all three of us would be in tears every night, trying to get her to bed over and over again, never knowing when the night would be over.

When we finally did it, she cried for 90 minutes the first night. Every minute of which was sheer torture for me. I had to distract myself with TV, painting my toenails, and reading motivational note cards (don't laugh! I needed them!) all at once.

I have come full circle now that I'm writing about sleep training on my own blog, because it was during Chelsea's middle-of-the-night crying jags when I first discovered blogs. I was up one night Googling something like "baby doesn't sleep" and came upon an old post on dooce. When I first read it, I didn't even understand what it was. An ad? An article of some sort? Chelsea had plenty of sleepless nights, giving me enough time to explore dooce's archives and finally figure out what a blog was.

It was an eternity before Chelsea went to sleep without tears. Anything and everything would trigger a setback and require us to start up training all over again: travel, recovering from an illness, switching to a big girl bed. Now I just count her among the ranks of most kids whose bedtime refrain is always, "But I'm not tired!"

Savannah took an hour to get to sleep last night. And then she slept FOR NINE GLORIOUS HOURS. She woke up wiggly and happy and smiley. And what did I use to distract myself from her crying? A blog, of course.

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