I used to be VERY passionate about sleep training. I sleep trained Jadyn (my oldest, who's now 19) I remember reading the Babywise book, which explains you feed your baby every few hours on a set schedule and put them down for naps awake instead of nursing or rocking them to sleep. The idea is that full feedings during the day mean they don't need to eat at night. Plus learning to fall asleep on their own means they can settle themselves when they wake up. As a young mom who was worried about losing sleep, I thought it sounded great! A baby sleeping through the night early? Count me in!
I found it was pretty easy to implement with Jadyn. She was a mellow, go with the flow baby who went on the schedule naturally and slept through the night with little fuss. When pregnant with Poppy and on our babymoon in Santa Barbara, I reread Babywise and decided that we’d get Poppy on this same schedule too. It would make everything seamless, and I could jump back into work the way I was planning to. Easy right? Wrong!
I did everything the book said. I was so concerned about her getting the right amount of milk at the right time that I would pump and feed her the pumped milk (extra work for no reason, I know, I know) at set hours. It had worked for Jadyn, so I thought it had to work for Poppy too. She slept in a bassinet for the first couple of months in our room, and when she was around three or four months old I moved her down the hallway into her own room and crib. Co-sleeping wasn't something I'd even consider. All the schedules recommended babies sleep in their own bed and fall asleep on their own, no rocking and certainly no nursing to sleep. Bad habits! I would think, as if my baby would be using nursing as "a crutch." I thought I just needed to be more scheduled and start the day at the same time and wake her up from her naps to get her on the same nap schedule daily.
Every night I kept the baby monitor on my night stand, and when I heard her cry I'd run down the hall to get her, always in the biggest fog. It took so much effort to get out of bed and get to her. Anthony and I got so little sleep. I was so set on her sleeping through the night on her own, but some nights we'd cave and try bouncing her back to sleep. I was so confused about why she wasn't sleeping through the night that I thought I must be doing it wrong, and wondered why it had felt so simple with Jadyn. I remember being exhausted, trying to work and keep up with everything on four to five hours of sleep. I'd read mom blogs about babies on Babywise who fell right into the routine and never needed to be nursed to sleep. Their babies seemed relaxed and ready for bed, which made me feel even worse about it all. Meanwhile I was always asking what Poppy should be doing, whether she should be sleeping now or eating now, instead of going off of her cues. I would research “sleep regressions” and how we could skip them (as if a 4 month old had read the book and just needed some reminding). There was so much information that it felt like I was failing all the time.
So by the time I was pregnant with Elliott, we said there was NO WAY we were doing the schedule with him. I kept thinking back to simpler times, before anyone had written a book on how to sleep train a baby. What did moms do then? They wore their babies and kept them close. I wanted it to feel simple and practical for us. Scheduling definitely works for some babies (it worked for Jay!), and maybe I’d feel differently if Poppy had done well with it too, but if Elliott was going to be anything like her it was a hard no. So I donated my baby scheduling books. What we did instead gave us the best sleep we’d ever had with a newborn, and it made us want to do the newborn stage all over again.