Sleeping update

I want to thank everyone for their thoughts on sleeping. I am so glad to hear that people have done quite a wide variety of things with their kids, and it helped to hear what worked and what didn't.

Basically, what spurred this discussion was a particularly horrible night last Saturday. Penny woke up every 1.5-2 hours to eat. I'd nurse her and put her back to bed, but then she'd just wake up to spit up everything I'd just fed her. And then she'd be hungry again, I guess. Repeat this cycle several times through the night, and then picture us arriving at church. Not a pretty sight. ;)

I realized something needed to change.

For a couple nights I picked her up and got her to go back to sleep without nursing for a few of her nighttime wakings.

For a few nights, whenever she'd wake up, Kevin would give her a pacifier and wait with her until she went back to sleep. On those nights, I slept upstairs where I couldn't hear her and enjoyed night after night of uninterrupted sleep. It was like manna from heaven.

We started noticing that while she had no problem sleeping without waking to nurse (and you can tell by looking she has the capacity to go a while without nursing), she still woke up every 2 hours just by habit. And so did we.

So we decided to just bite the bullet and let her cry. Not even giving her a pacifier.

After the first night, Kevin brought her to me and told me she'd woken up 3 times and to guess how long she'd cried every time. I gritted my teeth and guessed, "2 hours?" Nope! She'd cried 5-10 minutes each time and then gone to sleep. Woo hoo!!

Last night I stayed with her, and she woke up once at 3 AM, when she cried for about 5 minutes and went back to sleep.

It's working!

Thank you, everyone, for your helpful comments. You can see that we didn't do EXACTLY what someone else had done, but rather took helpful bits from everyone and made them our own. Which is EXACTLY what many of you said. :)