Neil's sleep pattern

Neil keeps waking up in the middle of the night, and requires that we hold him before he falls asleep. Sometime that lasts only 10 minutes, sometime he doesn't go back to sleep for 2 hours. Poor Lisa, she is almost afraid to go to sleep worrying about how to avoid lack of sleep!

So we looked up some books and did internet search. Everyone seems to say that we should let the child cry to sleep. This sounds horrible, and we were afraid that he will learn helplessness. Our doctor said that he will in fact learn self reliance. There is some truth to that, yet it is very difficult to just let him cry.

We may bite the bullet one of these days. But for now we have decided to take only the first half of the "Ferber Method" and create a routine and good associations with sleeping area. We are using his love for water - we try to keep him awake from 6:00 PM, and from 9:30 to 11:00 pm, we finish the following things : Let him play in the water, bathe, warm clothing, his last feeding, little play inside his crib, and finally force him to sleep inside.

We have done this past 3 days, and 2 of the nights he slept for about 6 hours (almost) straight. He does wake up once in while, but goes back after about 10 minutes, without picking him up. We hope to keep him awake longer in the evening. Let's see how it goes.