Crying it out!

Well, we finally decided we had exhausted all our resources, including ourselves and were ready to do the cry-it-out with Kaylee. This past month her routine has resorted to crazy waking, staying up for 2 hours or more. She wants to play and be with us. We discussed how upset Kaylee gets when we transfer her and put her down at night with her doctor, and she said even if she throws up, it’s still okay to do and she was very encouraging for us to do it. She said consistency is extremely important and once we do it we can’t go back. She said we need to do it now, that it will only get even more difficult as we go on especially when she gets transferred to her own crib – then she will always be depending on us and coming in our room.

Eric and I deliberated a lot on how to approach it, what our “rules” would be and when to do it. Our doctor said that the longest a baby ever cried was 13 days and knowing Kaylee’s temperament (how stubborn we know she is) I thought that could be us. So, we decided to not wait until we get closer to the weekend. It was a difficult decision but we tried everything else. So, last night when she woke up at midnight we let her cry 10 minutes, we comforted for 5, she cried 10, she threw up, we cleaned her up and comforted and then put her back in and she cried another couple mins. Eric said maybe I should sit next to her, when I did she looked at me, said “Okay” and then sat down in the crib. I said “Nite-nite, honey” and she sat there for a few minutes, then she laid down and in another few minutes I heard her breathing deep. Not bad – close to 30-40 minute effort as opposed to our nightly 2 hour efforts lately.

She woke up one other time, but whined a little and went back to sleep. I had to wake her up this morning to take her to day care, and she had had a bloody nose and we don’t know when it happened. It was dry so I guess she had it when she woke up that other time. I felt very bad for her for everything, very guilty and like a bad mom. I just have to lean on the doctor’s words and take stock in that Kaylee has had a number of rules put into place for her lately that have gone over very well and have been a success. So when we need to call the shots we have a good track record so far. I have to take stock in that what’s hard today will be easier tomorrow and especially when we are all sleeping through the night a couple weeks from now. We have to be strong, and the doctor put it to me in a way I could handle saying “this is what’s good for Kaylee – she needs the sleep, she needs the life skill of self-soothing for sleep.”

All in all, I guess I was anticipating there would even be more loud, violent, longer crying than there was. At times she would try to use her words to get our attention, saying, “Boogie… Boogie” over and over again (boogers) or “Blanky….Blanky” or “Daddy….Daddy.” We were impressed with this instead of the crying and would pop in to say something briefly to her when she did this to encourage her calm behavior – but we quickly realized this didn’t help things and popping in made her even more mad. So we stopped that quickly. The good news is she is trying to self-soothe a bit already. Wish us luck on this journey. It is hard one but I think we will all be better having gone through it.

Typically during transitions like this Kaylee can be kind of hard on me, getting mad at me and favoring her Daddy. She will kind of ignore me, that’s her punishment. I guess I can just be glad she had a father who’s so fun/supportive/available. She’ll come around – she has those other times. No one has to be concerned about her expressing herself – that child has quite the perserverance, personality and strength of character!

I am also hoping that this story may be helpful to another parent. We tried this half-heartedly with Kaylee a couple other times earlier and if I could go back and do it right, I would. The kids get way more insistent, loud-crying and more powerful screaming! Just nip it in the bud and find the strength if you can - hindsight is 20-20. Follow along with our journey, I'll post on what happens as we go ...