Riding the Sleep Train?

Well, tonight I'm posting about a subject that I've been reticent to discuss publicly - sleep training. No, not "crying it out". And I couldn't care less if Ethan sleeps through the night right now! (Honestly, since he almost always goes right back to sleep after eating, our time together in the middle of the night will be something that I will kind of miss someday, I'm sure...) What I'm talking about is encouraging Ethan to sleep when he's sleepy - and to fall asleep on his own.

Brian and I have gone back and forth about this, and I'm reading everything I can get my hands on (and have the time for!) about how to help your child sleep. Everything I read encourages parents of even very young babies to put them in their cribs when they are "drowsy, but awake". Our first problem was seeing the boy "drowsy, but awake"! Since he was about 10 weeks old and began to show us he was sleepy by yawning, he would fuss fuss fuss fuss fuss and then zzzzzzzzz..... :) Then, as he moved out of his fussiest stage around 3 months, he would just look more and more tired as the day went on, but had a really hard time sleeping for more than 20 minutes, 30 minutes, etc. during the day. Apparently this is not unexpected for a little guy his age, but I do hate to see him so zonked by 4:00 in the afternoon. We were starting to feel that we weren't doing Ethan any favors by being in charge of getting him to sleep.

So we thought, "He's almost 4 months old - 16 weeks by Thursday. Is it time to train him to fall asleep by himself?" And you know what that means - lots of crying! But tonight took us by surprise. We followed our bedtime routine - bath, bedtime snack, book....and then when I would usually retire to the rocking chair, we instead put him right into his crib and walked out the door. Fully anticipating tears in 5 minutes, I ate dinner hurriedly...and nothing. He did it! He fell asleep in his crib, after having been placed in there "drowsy, but awake"! Brian and I feel like we're playing hooky tonight. Very fun.

Now I'm sure this will not happen again right away. After all, he slept through the night once and it hasn't happened since! And I know that if we continue to do this in the evenings, we are bound to get some tears, and at some point we're going to have to let him do some crying without saving him after 3 minutes! But now we know that he can do it. If we get him at the right time, he can fall asleep in his crib on his own. Go Ethan!