Get Your Sleep (Training) On

There are a lot of you out there who don’t believe in sleep training, and that’s fine. Go on with your bad selves, Mamas (and feel free to skip ahead to the next chapter). Having said that, we also know that there are equally as many of you who are done feeling like lactating zombies and are desperate to feel like actual (sleeping) human beings again. If you fall into the latter category and you’re hell-bent on teaching your kid how to sleep without losing your mind in the process, we can help you out with some tips.

For us, sleep is non-negotiable. We are not—nor have we ever been—the kind of people who can even pretend to have our shit together on four hours of sleep. For the first few months of our kids’ lives, we felt like hell. We were tired all the time. We were grumpy. Our appetites were a mess. We were nowhere near our best selves.

As soon as we taught our spawn to fall asleep on their own without nursing, pacing, bouncing, swaying, lunging, or shushing, they were noticeably happier. And you know who else was happier? Us! We were happier!

Once we were sleeping through the night again, we felt like better, more patient moms. Moms who had a chance to recharge their batteries. Moms who were able to take on the daily grind without crying in line at the coffee shop.

If that’s what you need in your life, then sleep training might be worth a try. Is it easy? No. Is anything easy when it comes to babies? We’ll let you answer that one for yourself.

Now let’s get you through the initial shittiness so that you can reclaim those Zs (and your sanity) ASAP:

• Get your doctor involved, even just for peace of mind. Any time after baby’s four-month checkup, ask your doctor if they think baby is getting enough calories during the day to hold them over at night. Knowing that your kid is not waking due to hunger will make it easier to not run to them offering a boob whenever they squawk in the middle of the night.
• For some reason, babies seem to have their best sleep when they go to bed around 6:30 p.m. It seems insanely early, but if you’re going to give sleep training a try, starting with an early bedtime can make life a lot easier.
• Put baby down when they’re tired (but not losing-their-shit, wanted-to-go-to-bed-five-hours-ago tired). Google “infant sleep cues.” Watch them like a hawk. When you see a yawn or an eye rub, it’s go time.
• Once you identify when your baby is sleepy, track their rhythm. Kids are pretty consistent with wake times. When they are really tiny (around four to six months), they can only function with two-hour (max) wake-windows. At six to twelve months, that stretches to three-hour wake-windows, and thereafter, four- to five-hour wake-windows (at which point they’re down to one nap). Tracking it like this is much easier than trying to get them on a strict time schedule.
• Develop a sleep cue from you to your baby. It doesn’t have to be a big, elaborate series of events (e.g., three books, two songs, a bath, a massage, a story, a bottle, and bed). It just needs to be something you do to tell baby that it’s bedtime. For example, you could try singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on the way up the stairs. Any other trip upstairs is not accompanied by a tune. When there is singing involved, your baby will know it’s time to shut it down. If your kid is still an infant, you may feel like an asshole putting on a show for a little seal who shows no sign of computing, but trust us, if you do it every time, they start to clue in faster than you’d think.
• In the beginning (i.e., the first week of sleep training), try doing something loud and productive right after you put the baby down. Not only will it drown out the crying so you don’t feel like bolting up to baby’s room every fifteen seconds, but it will also help you pass the time more quickly (ten minutes can feel like an eternity when you’re sitting outside of your baby’s door, weeping as they shriek, but not so much of an eternity when you finally get your main floor vacuumed). Another huge benefit of the “noisy chore” trick is that it serves as a reminder that, if you stick with this sleep-training thing, you will once again be able to get shit done. You’ll finally have some GD “me-time” again, from 6:30 p.m. until your own bedtime! After you’ve spent 24/7 with a baby attached to your body for nearly half a year, trust us, it feels really friggin’ good.
• Don’t create an unrealistic sleep environment. Make sure you can more or less recreate the experience of going to sleep for baby with minimal effort if you’re not at home. Most kids can sleep with a bit of light (curtains, but not black-out curtains), a crib, a blankie, and a noise machine. Most can also sleep with you living your life around them (read: watching TV, entertaining guests, and doing other loud adult things). Anytime you’re at someone else’s house or out of town, this situation can be recreated with a pack ’n’ play, standard window coverings, a white noise app on your smartphone, and their little blankie from home.
• When the baby inevitably wakes up in the night, always give them ten minutes to figure their shit out before going in to intervene. Most of the time, they won’t make it to ten minutes before falling back asleep. If they do, it’s boob (or soother) and right back to bed. At the very beginning, if they wake up three times, maybe one of those times will last long enough to prompt you to get up and feed them. Dealing with one wake up between 6:30 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. will feel a lot more reasonable than that every-two-hours-all-night-long crap.
• Sleep train for naps using a similar tactic. If they have a short, shitty nap, give them ten minutes in the crib when they wake up to see if they’ll go back to sleep. You’ll be surprised at how often they’ll conk back out for an additional hour.
• Take regressions in stride. Every new skill (and bout of sickness) can be a setback, from sitting, to crawling, to talking, to standing, to teething, to colds, to growth spurts, etc. You know you’re in one when there’s literally a random overnight shift in sleeping patterns (i.e., nights that make you wake up in the morning thinking your life is over and you’ll never sleep again). You can get through regressions by reminding yourself that all is not lost and this is just a phase. During these phases, though, you just have to go into full-on survival mode. Nursing, soothers, bottles, cuddles—whatever. Once it starts to let up (longer stretches between waking up at night), go back into sleep-training mode.
• Have your partner go comfort the baby if they’re inconsolable in the night. If you go (especially if you’re nursing), baby will lose their shit until you cave and feed them because they know it’s there. Kids always give up faster with dad/a non-nursing parent. Go figure.
• If you do cave and end up feeding your crying cherub (happens to the best of us), don’t panic and pick them right back up again if they cry as soon as you lay them back down. Leave the room calmly, and give them ten minutes before sending your partner in to comfort them.
• Don’t let sleep training make you crazy. This process is ongoing, and it’s frustrating AF. Some nights it’ll be a total breeze; other nights you’ll spend 6:30 p.m. till 11:00 p.m. going back and forth from the nursery to the sofa with a baby who just really doesn’t feel like going to bed. Whatever. When that happens, our policy is that as long as it isn’t creating a new trend, who cares? Don’t be hard on yourself about any of it—no need to make a high-stress situation more stressful.