Breaking Point

I'll be honest.

I had originally planned to type up a wonderful blog post about my new love affair with cloth diapering, but when I woke up this morning I just couldn't do it.

I couldn't bring myself to do it today.

That's it. I'm fed up with all the expectations and weight placed on new mothers today. My baby is happy and healthy, what more do you want?


Dr. Sears.

I have a bone to pick with Dr. Sears. Yes, he has some good points. And yes, I started off fairly attachment-parenting orientated. However, when I started exclusively pumping I began to see the guilt-inducing tone in so many of his articles.

It starts off like this:
"You should do whatever works best for your baby..."

And by the end, more often than not, it turns into some smarmy version of:
"... but if you don't do this, this, and this, you'll screw up your child for life."

I don't need that kind of guilt and negativity. No parent does. Sure, I want what is best for my child just as much as the next mom, but I need my own sanity as well. I bottle-feed because I must. I am in the process of sleep-training because it has become necessary.
  
So what am I trying to say?

The main reason I just had to get this out into the universe today is because of me hitting my breaking point the other night. Edgar is six months old now. Since his 4-month sleep regression, his sleep pattern had been getting progressively worse and worse. I tried everything.

I tried being gentle. I tried no-cry and pick-up-put-down methods. I tried just going with it and feeding him whenever he woke up. You know what? It just made things worse. Sure, it might work for some moms and babies, but it didn't work for me and Edgar. Finally, the other night, he woke up five times in the night.

I know that it's a good thing to want to comfort your child and do everything for them, but there's something to be said about mama's sanity.

After researching into the Ferber method, DH and I decided that this would be the method that would most likely work out best for all of us should more gentle methods fail us. And fail us they did.

There is one major misconception about the Ferber method. Many believe that it means simply placing the baby awake in the crib and just leaving them there. In actuality, it's a "progressive waiting" approach. I do all the same things I would normally do with Edgar at bedtime (bath, book, and bottle) and then when he is drowsy but not asleep I place him in his bed. After specified intervals (on first night it's 3, 5, and then 10 minutes), I can go in and quietly reassure him, rub his tummy and/or head, put his pacifier back in, and then leave. This continues until baby falls asleep.

I did make a small venture into this method a month ago, but Edgar was clearly not ready to be sleep-trained at that point. He was exceedingly clingy the next day and I just didn’t feel that he was quite ready to enter into sleep training. Last night, however, he fell asleep within the first 10-minute interval and only woke twice early on in the night, both before I was even about to head to bed. Each of those times, he fell asleep a little more quickly than the previous. Edgar then slept through the night until 6:50AM. When he woke up this morning, he was more rested than I had seen him in months, drank a normal-sized bottle, and went right into playing as though nothing different had happened.

Despite this apparent initial success, I still felt unsure about “Ferberizing” because of the stigma it carries... until I came across this piece of writing that poked holes in Dr. Sears' reasons to not use CIO ("Cry It Out"). It was an eye opener. There were many more sources (like this and this) scattered across the interwebs. All of this was reassuring me that we were making the right decision for Edgar. It might not be right for every baby or parent, but it works for us.

When it comes down to it, there's really no discernable difference in the long term if parents use the Ferber method, as long as their children aren't actually being neglected. Sure, it's difficult to hear my baby cry, but I know that he is fed, dry, and ready (and needing) to sleep and to learn how to fall asleep on his own.

I'd rather have both of us rested and sane after a short period of crying, than exhausted and being short with my son as I try to soothe his cries all night long.

Some mothers can handle the exhaustion and still be happy and cheerful in the morning when their baby gets up every few hours every single night for years on end. Bless you. Good on you. If they bottled a magic potion that allowed everyone to do that, I'm sure that the pharmaceutical companies would be all over it, and that it'd be popular with the partying crowd. Hell, I’d buy a bottle of it.

Until then, Dr. Sears can go suck on a lemon.

Unless he likes lemons. Then he can go suck on something else.