We'll see how clever we are

We are currently "Ferberizing" Owen. For those readers without babies on the brain, Dr Ferber is the author of a fairly well-known book on infant and child sleeping. His technique for getting a child to learn to sleep better is, broadly speaking, crying it out. Dr Ferber's key contribution to this traditional method, it seems to me, is breaking crying-it-out into smaller chunks of time, by having the parent go in to check on the wailing tot. Ostensibly, this is to reassure the child that he has not been forever abandoned by previously caring parents; it is also a useful way to assuage the parents' concern that the child might be in multiple pieces or have a large, sharp bit of metal stuck in him.

So that's why I'm blogging at 0315: because I'm waiting for either a) the current 15-minute period to end, or b) Owen to stop crying. The difficulties Owen has with sleeping, such as they are, seem to be linked to the pacifier. He's in the habit of sleeping with one. It will fall out during the night, so when he has a normal waking in the middle of the night, he can't get back to sleep. On some nights, it has been a trivial once or twice that we go and put the bink back in his mouth; on others, it's been significantly more trying. We were planning to live with it for a while longer before making a concerted effort to decouple pacifiers from sleeping - perhaps Owen would even learn to find the paci and put it back in his mouth himself - but then he had a couple of nights when he was crying mightily at bedtime, even with pacifier and high-strength cribside comforting from Mom or Dad. In the midst of this last night, we decided, "Dude, if you're going to cry your head off no matter what, it might as well be by yourself."

[Pause to check on Owen. Confirmed: all in one piece; no large, sharp bits of metal. Now for more waiting.]

He only cried for 25 minutes at bedtime last night, and then lightly for another 25 minutes early in the morning. We considered this to be pretty good, so our decision seemed a clever piece of parenting judo, using Owen's momentum towards our own end. But O! - beware the cockiness, young parent! This current round of wakefulness is at 50 minutes and going strong.