Toren slept from 9:00 pm until 5:30 am last night. Marvelous! Stupendous! Amazing!
There is a bit more to the story – last Thursday he woke up several times, starting at 4:00 am. I was up from 4:00 am on. After that incident, I decided (Debi agreed, but I kind of insisted) that it was time to train Toren to sleep through the night. Apparently some kids just start sleeping through the night; others don’t.
So, we decided that we were going to make Toren sleep from midnight until 6:00 am. We knew he could go about 7 hours without eating, so we figured six would be a good start. Our plan: if he woke up during that window, I would go in and make sure he was okay, but wouldn’t touch him or pick him up, just let him cry himself back to sleep.
We did it for a couple nights and he was doing a pretty good job of crying himself back to sleep in about 5 minutes. He was working his way up to 5 or 6 hours, then last night we put him down at 9:00. We went to bed at 11:00, thinking he’d wake up around midnight for one final feeding. I woke up around 4:00, but it was just because that’s what time he has been getting up. I fell back to sleep, but didn’t know if he had woken up other times during the night (I don’t always wake up when he does). At 5:30 he woke and Debi fed him. I got up around 6:00 and asked her if he woke up any other times. Nope!
Let’s hope this continues!
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Good for you! This is just like what happens in a video I show in my intro psych course. (It illustrates an application of behaviorism that students find easier to believe if they see it.) I’m glad it worked for you!