Ferber

Davis had a succesful surgery, he no longer snores, he is breathing happily through his NOSE and seems much better as far as breathing is concerned.

One thing surgery did not fix was his inability to fall asleep on his own. This has become a huge problem in our house, we knew it was a huge problem, but we have been waiting until after his surgery to do something about it.

Enter Ferber.

I know many sleep solution books are "forbidden" by some moms, but we cannot live like this anymore, Davis doesn't sleep well, I don't sleep well and neither does Jeff. The 3 of us cannot survive on 4 hours of sleep per night, yep, you got it, between all the wake ups we pretty much get 4 hours a night, sometimes we get lucky because Davis is exhausted from many nights in a row of disrupted sleep that he will sleep 8 hours, but like I said, that is after many nights (think 7 or 8 nights of little sleep). Lack of sleep is not only terrible for adults it is even worse for infants and toddlers. After Kindermusik today I dropped Mr. Sleepless off at my mom's house for a few hours, went to the library and got my books written by Richard Ferber.

Tonight is night one. Well, sort of. I did put him to bed with a bottle. The bottle and being rocked by mommy is his crutch. He is currently asleep, but if tonight is a typical night he will wake up sometime between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. The first wakeup we are to wait 5 minutes, then go in for 2-3 minutes and pat his back and assure him it is ok, after those 2-3 minutes are up we leave again, if he is not asleep in 10 minutes we go back in, repeat the 2-3 minutes, if he is not asleep then, we leave for 15 minutes, we repeat the 2-3 minutes, if he is still not asleep we leave again for 15 minutes, at this point we keep repeating this until he finally falls asleep. We might be in for a long night people!!!

The other thing I'm doing is weaning him off his bottle crutch, I've decided to use the guide in Richard Ferber's book for this. I just don't think I can take that bedtime bottle away cold turkey so tomorrow night we will only give him 7 oz of formula rather than 8 oz. On night #2 he gets 6 oz., night #3 he gets 5 oz. and so on until no more bottle. By night #7 he will get 1 oz. and then hopefully we are done with the bedtime bottle. I'm not going to have one of those kids that still carries a bottle around at 3.

I will be writing another post tomorrow as a follow up to how our night went.

If you are interested in reading a truly successful Ferber story, check out my friend Jene's blog, she did it and after re-reading her blog entries for like the hundredth time I'm confident we can do this!! I know if we can get through the first few nights it will be so worth it in the end.