The kid I babysit can't sleep anymore, either. There's a pretty specific set of reasons for this, but he's not my kid, so I won't go into them here on the internet. The point is: toddler no sleepy. His parents went away yesterday for a long weekend, leaving him and his older sister with me, so I'm responsible for starting the process of sleep training. His mom chose to use The Sleepeasy Solution by Jennifer Waldburger and Jill Spivack as a guide, and it actually isn't all that different from what I've done to put him to bed in the past. Meaning: we read a few stories, then I leave him in his crib with the lights out and a white noise machine on, and he (usually) cries for a little while before putting himself to sleep. After all, when you're putting a kid to bed who's used to being nursed to sleep, and you personally are not lactating, that's pretty much the option you have. And it's worked well for me in the past. I've come to expect fifteen minutes of crying at most, and then he usually sleeps for twelve beautifully silent hours. This makes his mom very jealous because he gives her a lot of middle-of-the-night wake-ups.
Last night was his first night of real sleep learning using the book's method, which adds periodic check-ins to my own, apparently more heartless method of letting him cry it out all alone. Unless he sounded like he was starting to self-soothe, I would pop into his room for a few seconds every 15 minutes to remind him that I was still nearby and that it was time for him to take a few deep breaths and go to sleep. I went into this pretty confident that I wouldn't even have to check on him once because this is nothing new for us. He was going to be either asleep or clearly on his way there by the first 15-minute mark. Obviously. But here's my advice for parents everywhere: try not to let your 19-month-old get in the habit of sleeping in your bed for the two weeks immediately prior to the start of sleep learning. It will ruin everything. For example, it made this kid who's normally very capable of putting himself to sleep take an hour and ten minutes to do so. For some of that time, mostly at the tail end, he was just talking to himself, but the other 57 minutes or so were full-out crying. Or yelling my name. Or, when that didn't work, yelling everyone else's name: Mama, Dada, his sister, even his sister's best friend. Because it was entirely possible she could hear him from her house down the block.
During my last check-in, at about the climax of his pissed-offness, I popped my head in and spoke calmly to him about deep breaths and needing to rest his body and how much confidence I had in his ability to fall asleep on his own, while he attempted, in open defiance of the laws of physics, to climb the vertical bars of his crib. When I closed the door, leaving him alone again, he amped up his crying until he sounded like a full-grown velociraptor.
In my own ragged, post-insomniac state, this was hard to withstand. His crying was aggravating the anxiety-induced nausea I'd had all day. And I can only assume he wasn't enjoying it, either. So I was relieved for both of our sakes that he mellowed back out within a few minutes, then gradually tapered off into reciting (rather than yelling) the names of everyone he could think of. Soon, he was actually asleep. I held my breath for a couple of minutes before letting myself believe it, but I didn't hear so much as a squawk from him until 6:30 in the morning, and then it was just that: a single squawk and right back to sleep. I had to wake him up a couple of hours later, once he'd had 12 solid hours of sleep. And since he fell asleep for this afternoon's nap after less than two minutes of crying, I'm tentatively ready to declare sleep training my bitch. Or if not my bitch, at least listening attentively and making reasonable decisions based on my requests. And for the moment, that's good enough. I just hope the boy's parents have the same kind of success when they get back.
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