As of now, baby girl cannot fall asleep on her own. She either has to be in her swing, in the car, nursing or screaming at the top of her lungs in order to fall asleep. I wouldn't mind letting her sleep in the swing if it was smaller and more portable (bringing that swing with us to the beach was not fun. Yes, we brought her swing with us. Don't judge) but it's really hard to get any sleep when Baby Girl is waking up every hour and a half or 2 hours and fidgeting all night. And there are more reasons for wanting to sleep train, but now the time has finally come to execute the plan.
After researching a few different methods, I've decided to try the "Pick up/Put down" method outlined in Tracy Hogg's book The Secrets of the Baby Whisperer. In essence, you do your bed time routine and then put your baby to bed in her crib while she's still awake. When your baby cries, you come in pick her up, calm her down and as soon as she's calm, you put her right back down. You do this every time she cries until she falls asleep on her own. Tracy Hogg mentions that you may have to repeat this cycle.. a lot, but that usually within a few days, they've figured it out and can put themselves to sleep.
I liked this method because it doesn't allow for the Evie to cry very long, therefore not letting her feel like she's been abandoned. It also allows us to start training her to fall asleep on her own, without having to hear my baby crying for more than a few minutes (which I can't handle). The drawback of this method is that it is very labor intensive on the parents for the first few nights. That's why we're starting this on Friday night, so we don't have many things we have to do and can get in naps during the day.
Any way, if anyone else out there has done some sleep training, I'd love to hear about your experiences!
Your plan sounds good. It's about what we did with W. C always fell asleep on her own. I've often wondered what I did to deserve that, haha, but I figure it's a good blessing considering that there are two of them. Payback is now she fights going to sleep with every ounce of determination in her being. But I agree, the plan is good, and W only took a couple of days to adjust. We went through a phase where we'd get them down and then they'd still wake up for another bottle about 2 hours post bed time, but they went back to sleep very well after that. And that lasted a couple of weeks at most I think. Good luck! Hope everything goes well!
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