OK, August 17th, 2010 when Shea woke up was just another day for him. Little did he know...Steve and I had had enough. The binkie, the plug, the pacifier was great in the beginning. But it became the crutch, the devil plastic bouncing thing that Shea learned to chuck out his crib nightly about every 2-3 hours. Although initially he slept better with it, lately, he began waking up more and crying when he couldn't find the darn thing to put back into his lip smacking face in the middle of the night.
Poor Steve, usually on night duty since 1) he sleeps light as a feather and can hear Shea and 2) I may have to get up early for work, so understandably he was getting up for Shea. The binkie became the nightly game. We even had the "emergency back-up" on the dresser so you could avoid the frantic hands-and-knees searching in the dark for the green Soothie. So, that's it. Enough. We're gonna Ferberize Shea. We're going for the cry-it-out method. After reading the horror stories on-line, I prepared us for up to 60 minutes of crying, checking in with him every 5-10 minutes.
The day came and miraculously on the first nap, he barely cried! OK, he was super tired, and he had monkey-boo (the savior crib soft cuddley Shea must have). Afternoon nap - a bit worse - but he still only cried about 15 minutes, amazingly. Now, its been just over a week and you won't believe it but Shea is sleeping through the night completely! We even successfully weaned out the last early AM feeding at 4 - so he sleeps from 7:30 PM until 6 AM like clockwork, hooray. There is still some struggling during the afternoon nap, but overall, trashing the binkie was the BEST DECISION. It really was for us more than him in hindsight, and it didn't even really help that much. If Shea was going to cry, a pacifier barely pacified.
For the next milestone - Shea is almost crawling. He's mastering the caterpillar break dance move first though, so any day now, and Safety power outlet covers here we come! He's also perfecting the yoga downward dog pose first also.
