Pulling the plug

Two posts today: Read below first if you’re following the sleeping saga.

After much success with Abby falling asleep in her crib (albeit, with some attention from us and a Mama or Abba within reach – our reach, not hers) with her pacifier, we thought we might try to tackle another goal on our sleep training list.

Though getting Abby to sleep through the night every night is a nice idea (maybe – my breasts still aren’t so sure about this), it pales in comparison to weaning her off her pacifier. I have nothing against her pacifier in general. It makes her happy when she’s stuck in a crappy situation (such as on a crowded, standing room only bus during a 45-minute ride back from Jerusalem) where I’m somewhat limited in how I can soothe her. I don’t like the idea of plugging a kid up when they’re at home and need your attention, but there are times it comes in handy.

Abby has always fallen asleep at the breast. When she pops herself off, I pop the paci in. To the crib she goes. And she always slept well that way – on her back. When she began being a side sleeper, we had paci problems. The pacifier falls out. She’s not quite adept enough to get it back in (though to give her the benefit of the doubt, I’m not sure I would be if I were sound asleep in a dark room with somewhat limited fine motor skills – she does quite well with it during the day). And then she wakes. Sometimes, it’s once a night and that’s when I nurse her.

But lately, it’s been every 45 minutes. All night long. That’s no good for us or a baby.

In addition, the pick-up-put-down technique doesn’t mix so well with a pacifier. The whole point of PU/PD is that you teach the baby that although you are there and they haven’t been abandoned, they need to self-soothe and put themselves to sleep in their crib. If you’re constantly having to replace the plug, they aren’t self-sufficient sleepwise. So before we tackle eliminating the night feedings or reach a point where we can actually leave a drowsy girl in her crib with a kiss goodnight and know she’ll fall asleep, we have to pull the pacifier.

We eliminated all pacifiers this morning. It made naps much more challenging to say the least. All told, Abby should nap roughly 4-5 hours during the day, if she sticks to the schedule we’re following (we can tweak, of course – but you have to have something to start with and this is what is suggested for 5 month olds). Thursday she slept for a combined total of 75 minutes from 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Suffice it to say she didn’t have a hard time falling asleep when she nursed before bedtime. I actually had to jostle her awake so that she was going into her crib awake.

She did wake 45 minutes later – my guess is it was out of habit, at this point – but we did the PU/PD technique with her and she fell back to sleep from a wide-awake rage in her crib without nursing or the pacifier. It took 20 minutes to get her back down. That was at 8:30 and it’s 11:30 now and although I’ve heard little sleeping dreaming noises coming from her room, she is still sound asleep.

This sets the stage. From here, we can work toward putting her in her crib after her bedtime routine and leaving her to fall asleep on her own. The sheer thought of it makes me giddy. Bring on the night feedings! If I know I can put my girl back in her crib and she’ll go to the land of Nod, I welcome a good night feed.

You can imagine how much Jeremy appreciates it. When your baby only nurses to sleep, it makes it somewhat challenging for your husband to care for her alone without losing his sanity. Poor Abby has always found his chest to be a bit flat, if you will.

So – the night is young. But we have high hopes. And determination. And a plan. And even if it doesn’t get better than this for a long while yet, “this” is pretty fabulous.