To Cry or Not to Cry

So I have a little problem. My problem is my sweet little fitful sleep monster. Yes, my sweet little Miss Courtney does not sleep well and never has. At 20 months old she has probably only had half a dozen nights on which she has slept through the night and maybe a dozen or two on which she only woke up only once. On an average night she is up two to four times a night and on several nights she has been up five or six, or more times. Most times she goes back to sleep quickly once I get her and rock her, but on a few nights it takes an hour or two to get her back to sleep.

I know that this is a problem that I have created. More or less I unintentionally trained her to be a bad sleeper. I trained her to be so dependent on me to go to sleep. For the first year and a half of her life her crib was in my husband’s and my room. So she had easy access to mom. First it was the nursing to sleep for bed and naps. Now it is the rocking or bouncing to sleep. When she was still in my husband’s and my room it got to the point where my husband would sleep on the couch just to be able to get some sleep. He would offer to help and even try but that seemed to turn out worse because she would just cry and cry and I wouldn’t get any sleep because I knew if I would just take her she would stop. So now I am up throughout the night getting her back to sleep.

After twenty months of this I have decided it is time to really do something to train her to sleep better. With the older two we used the “cry-it-out” method and I can testify that it works. But it isn’t easy to sit in the other room while your child is screaming for you. The experts say to go in every few minutes to check them and comfort them without picking them up but that only seems to make things worse. They cry even harder once you leave again. So eventually we got to the point where we would stop going in. After about three nights of this, each night getting better, we finally had success. They would go to bed with very little fuss and sleep well through the night because they no longer needed me to rock them to sleep. We tried this with Courtney but it didn’t work for a number of reasons. Reason 1) Her sisters couldn’t stand the crying. They would feel really bad for her and start crying and have a hard time going to sleep themselves. 2) Courtney got hysterical and had a hard time being calmed. 3) There was only so much of the crying that my husband and myself could handle. Maybe it had been too long since we had last been through this being that Courtney and Shaylee are four years apart in age.

I can honestly say that I don’t mind rocking her to sleep. It is actually quite enjoyable most nights. The biggest problems are that 1) I have to put her to sleep. That makes it hard for me if for some reason I wanted to go somewhere in the evening and needed to be able to have someone else take care of her. 2) She wakes up so many times, which sleep expects say is normal but most of us know how to just roll over and go back to sleep. That doesn’t work for my sweet baby. She needs me to help her and to be honest I am tired.

So now I am reading a book about the “No-Cry” method. We will see if it has any good suggestions. In the end “To cry or not to cry?” That is the question. And those tears may not be just Courtney’s.