The sleep experiment results

It has been over a week and I'm pretty happy with the results of our sleep experiment. Let us review-

Night 1:
2 hours of upset baby. Then slept until 6am.

Night 2:
Slept all night, woke at 5:30am. Not too bad.

Night 3:
Roughly 2 hours of upset baby. Then slept until 7am.

Night 4:
20 minutes of upset baby. Then slept until 6:15am

Night 5:
40 minutes of upset baby. Then slept until 8am.

Night 6:
Slept all night, woke at 5am. Not too bad, but kinda early. Fell back asleep until 8am, mercifully.

Night 7:
30 minutes of upset baby, fell back asleep by himself, awake at 6:15am.

Night 8:
5 minutes of snuffling around at 4am. Some whining. Fell back asleep by himself, awake at 7am.

Night 9:
Slept all night, awake around 6:30am

Night 10:
Slept all night, awake around 6:30am

Clearly we are seeing a trend of distinct improvements. I am quite pleased with the results of this, especially the last few nights.

And while I wouldn't recommend this to everyone, it had worked well for us. Cooper seems to be a fairly quick learner and did indeed change his sleeping habits by the end of the 7 day period.

The full and real question will be answered with time- will he have a permanent change? Well, part of that has been answered with "yes." The "yes" is that if I stop nursing him at night, he can learn to put himself back to sleep. This was quite obvious after the first few nights were behind us, and the late night wakeups started to resolve themselves with some whining, quiet crying, and falling back asleep.

The second part is "will he stop waking up?" I think the answer to this is yes, as well. He sleeps more through the night than he ever did before. I think that by not feeding him, the bodily rhythm he had that woke him up was disrupted, and the new rhythm of not getting a reward (food, mommy snuggle time) for waking will take over completely.

I know he would have eventually done this without our help. But I'm glad we did it now. My business trips are coming up soon, and the knowledge that chances are Matt might have a kid that whines for a few minutes late at night, rather than one that screams for two hours, is very reassuring to me.