Sleep training: Two months later

It's officially been two months since Mike and I decided to sleep train Holden. If we started it anxious about the process and nervous about the outcome (and how long it was taking!), we now consider ourselves total converts to the sleep-training way of parenting. Holden can go to sleep at naps and night with nary a fuss, and if he feels like blowing off some steam he cheerily babbles to his mobile (which is hilarious to witness through the monitor). That said, I think that its important to note that sleep training is not a simple "3 night" solution, as many of the books suggest. Like all things related to parenting, its a process of continual adjustments, and there are always bad days here and there. It took us a while to realize this, but once we did it was smooth sailing. So for those of you out there contemplating (or going through) sleep training, here's a few things we learned:

The books don't really define what the mean by success:
Sure, our kid started sleeping through the night within the magical "3 days" they advertise, but he didn't cut down on the bedtime crying for a week. And then he still would fuss for 5 or 10 min--sometimes more--for several weeks thereafter. We had to make our own little adjustments throughout--on the routine and the timing--and we had to consistently trust the process. Then one day, he stopped crying at all. Suddenly, we knew all of our work had paid off.

It's hard to figure out the timing:
It took us a while to figure out that if we moved Holden's bedtime 30 min earlier, he would stop all that fussing. And there are still days when it's hard to figure out just when Holden needs a nap. And I know that this will constantly change, because he'll keep growing, maturing, adjusting his own need for sleep.

There will always be bad days:
Sleep training does not mean the baby will always go down without a peep and will not wake up until the next morning. Sometimes he/she will, for some reason, wake up or fuss. Maybe its teething. Maybe he's having a mini-growth spurt. Maybe something's just bugging him. Once we made peace with this fact, everything began to run more smoothly.

It will change the way you think about crying and sleep:
There's a philosophy out there that if a baby's crying, it's because they need you. I agree with this to some extent, but I don't fully buy it. After weeks of working on this sleep thing, I think that sometimes--often in fact--babies cry because they're overtired. We've learned that if you protect their sleep, they cry a lot less. Which brings me to my second point: Mike and I have now become fierce advocates of sleep. We protect his nap times as much as we can, to the point that I think it probably drives some of our friends nuts. But it pays off big time. Holden is happy, active, and bright eyed, and (in my obviously biased opinion) intelligent. His naps have gotten longer over time, and he can stay up a little longer--all because we've continued to make sleep a priority.

And the best part, we now have time to ourselves:
Now that Holden goes to bed before 8 pm, Mike and I have time to work on projects, watch TV, and just relax. During the weekends Mike is able to garden outside during Holden's naps. And I can work on my school projects in spurts throughout the day, because I can almost always count on the fact that Holden will nap at least 1 1/2 hours in the morning, and at least an hour--sometimes 2-- in the afternoon. And it's my firm belief that happy parents make a happy baby!