Friday, October 14, 2005

Another post about sleep

Yesterday I ran into two aquaintances, both mothers of seven month old babies, and both proponents of the Gina Ford routine-nazi system. Both women raved about how, by following Ford's The Contented Little Baby Book, their babies slept through the night from an early age and the mums actually had social lives.

I was starting to wonder whether we should've taken Ford more seriously. At the very least we're going to have to break our habit of rocking Baby to sleep all the time, because she should really learn to fall asleep on her own.

Freshly inspired to re-try the bath-feed-bed routine, I put Baby through it around 9pm while the Boy was in the next room in a computer game orgy. To my surprise, Baby went straight to sleep after her post-bath feed - no agitation, no pukes and no fretting. She was fast asleep before 10pm (a miracle!) and I was able to have my first early night for at least two weeks.

I was so excited about my success that I was unable to sleep for ages. Oh, the irony.

Baby didn't favour me with a long sleep last night though; my feeding services were demanded every 2 1/2 hours. Oh well, you can't have everything I suppose.

5 comments:

darth said...

we tried several techniques, read lotsa books, heard lots of advice, but never could bear the crying thing...and in the end, we just took turns getting no sleep for the first..uh..well, a pretty long time LOL...darth jr. finally started sleeping thru the night, later than most perhaps, but it all works out in the end ;)

Violet said...

darth: the crying's the hardest, eh?

darth said...

violet-it was :lol: we were wimps...never could let him cry himself to sleep. he ended up sleeping on his own eventually.

the funny thing was, when we got a puppy a couple years ago..same thing..LOL!!

Urban Chick said...

i always preferred tracy hogg the baby whisperer to gina - seemed somehow more flexible...and i never could contemplate the controlled crying thing - also too much of a wimp

even on nights when the chicklets sleep well, i don't think i have put my head on the pillow only to wake 7/8 hours later since i was pregnant - it's infuriating!

Violet said...

darth: the pup too? Makes you wonder whether to blame the parents then ;-)

urban chick: I must get hold of that Tracy Hogg book again. She does seem a little more realistic, but I was having trouble categorising my daughter - and that seemed pretty important to following her methods.