First let me say that Dr. Ferber is my hero. His method of "gradual extinction" is highly recommended, and although I knew it would be hard, we decided to try it out. When following the Ferber method you put your child to bed awake because you are trying to break bad sleep associations. His theory is that if you were used to being rocked to sleep every night and then you woke up alone in your crib you wouldn't be very happy about it, and you wouldn't be able to go back to sleep without being rocked. The goal is to teach your child to go to sleep in her crib, so if she wakes up in the middle of the night she will be able to put herself back to sleep.
Of course, most babies who are used to being rocked to sleep aren't very happy about being put into their cribs when they're still awake, so they cry. The Ferber method allows the partent to go check on/comfort the child at set intervals so the child knows that she's not being abandonned in her crib. I really think this is more for the parents than the kids since, Harper didn't even seem to notice that I was trying to get her to calm down.
We moved Harper's crib into the spare bedroom so she wouldn't disrupt Tannah's sleep (or bother our neighbors too much). Their room looks so empty with only one crib!
The first night the intervals were 3 minutes, 5 minutes, and 7 minutes. I put Harper in her crib and set a time for three minutes. You're not supposed to pick your baby up when you go in, and you're only supposed to stay for 1-2 minutes maximum. Harper cried, I cried, Wei-Yand was excited that we were teaching our daughter and doing some "real parenting". I went in to pat Harper and tell her that mommy loves her, and she just kept crying. It was heartbreaking. When I hear one of my babies crying, everything in me screams to go pick her up and make her feel better. I kept telling myself that this was going to benefit all of us because a lack of sleep isn't good for her either.
I went in at the prescribed intervals, and she fell asleep after 36 minutes. I really thought she was going to hold out for much longer than that, so we were really excited. Wei-Yand army crawled into the room to make sure that she was ok. She was, so we high-fived and decided that this might actually work.
She woke up 45 minutes later, I went in to pat her, and she fell back to sleep before my 3 minute timer went off. Again, we considered this a success. I went to sleep.
She woke up around 11:15, and that is when the fun (I'm being sarcastic here) began. We really wanted to try to get her to extend her time between feedings, so we set four hours as the time she needed to go between feedings. She cried until I fed her at 12. She cried for a little while after the feeding, but then went to sleep. She kept waking up on and off, and Wei-Yand went to go lay down in the spare bedroom next to her crib so he could comfort her. I tried to get some sleep, but it's really hard for me to sleep when I could hear her crying.
Tannah woke up around 3:15, so I fed both girls. Again, Harper cried for a while, but eventually fell asleep and slept until I woke her up at 7 am. The book says not to let your baby sleep past her normal wake up time so she gets used to sleeping at night. She smiled at me in the morning just like she always does, so I was encouraged that she didn't hate me.
The book says to use the same system with naps, but if your child doesn't fall asleep within 30 minutes to end the nap. Lets just say that Harper didn't nap on Monday. However, she was still in fairly good spirits as long as someone was playing with her.
This is another really long post, so I'll continue the story later. Don't worry, the training starts going much better on day 2:)
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