"Cry-it-out" is working well, though challenging

Time is short, so I am just going to get right to it: Baby updates!

We've been doing the cry-it-out thing at bedtime for three weeks now, and I am pleased to report it is successful. Darling doesn't go down perfectly, sweetly, and quietly every night, but she goes down fairly easily and what's more, she stays down! At about two months old, she started sleeping at night for very long stretches -- 6, 8, sometimes even up to 12 hours. She was that way for a couple of months. Then she hit a little growth spurt. After that she started teething. Then she was out of the habit, and it just kept getting worse and worse until she was getting up every 2 or 3 hours at night (not usually to nurse; she was just waking up) and she was spending far too much time sleeping in our bed. As I mentioned in a post last month, our pediatrician said she needed to learn how to fall asleep on her own. He said she would sleep better when she did. And he said it was okay to start letting her cry a bit at bedtime. So, after some soul-searching and a couple of awful nights, we gave it and gave it a chance.

Now, three weeks later, I can report that it was and is worthwhile. Yes, it is hard when I put her down in her crib, give her kisses and loving words, and have to hear her cry when I back out of the room. But she cries for only a minute or two, then collapses into dreamland. Sometimes she doesn't cry at all, just rolls around a bit until she's comfortable then goes to sleep. If the neighborhood is loud or the house is loud -- i.e. it's Tuesday night and Nate has the youth group leaders over for a meeting (arg!) -- then she needs a little extra love. Any way it happens, Darling sleeps at least 8 hours straight, and always sleeps at least 10 hours total (usually closer to 11 hours). Lovely. I usually get 7 hours, sometimes even continuously.

As I mentioned, Darling likes to move around a little bit in her crib until she's in a comfortable position. Usually this means she's wedged herself into a corner of the crib. She's almost always on her tummy, sometimes on her side, never on her back. (The pediatrician said this is okay -- she's old and big enough to sleep however she wants... not that I could do anything about it, since my kid is stubborn. Insert comment from Kimmy, "In other words, she's YOUR baby?" :) When baby girl wakes up, she likes to sit right up. Wraps her blanket around herself and starts to chatter or scream, if she's wet.

One of the nice things about this shift has been free time in the evenings. I once again have a couple of hours to use for cleaning, balancing the checkbook, journaling, planning the garden, or whatever other devious project needs doing. It's marvelous. A necessary stretch of quiet work for the sake of my sanity and home organization.

The opening line of this blog post indicated updates, plural, but I am out of time. My latest car seat ramblings, a blurb about feline-baby friendship, and the giant set of photos I want to upload will have to wait until another time. (If you're a FB friend you can see some of the photos posted over on my page.) Cheers!