Last night was much much better.
Well...not much much better but frankly I'm feeling so giddy from having a decent nights sleep, it certainly feels as though it was much much better!
Anyway, Lib went down absolutely fine at 7ish, so all was great. Then...she woke again at 8.30 and decided to cause havoc. Si ended up bringing her downstairs, and low and behold, it was the same old problem.
Then my Mum emailed me this link about self-soothing.
Now, I certainly wasn't against self-soothing, it just seemed a drastic course of action before and we had sort of muddled on without it. However, I think it's fair to say we'd reached the end of our tether. So we gave it a go. The article had some really good points about putting her down to sleep. We'd gotten in the habit of waiting until she was asleep before we put her in her cot, so of course, the article's point that a child needs to learn to get to sleep without you, rang true. Also, Lib definitely had too many toys in her cot, so we singled out her monkey called Ralph as her little sleeping buddy.
In the end, it only took half an hour of her screaming before she gave in. As the article suggested, I went in every 10 mins or so, just to sooth her and make it clear that Ralph is there to look after her (whether she understands or not, I have no idea!). It was really hard (at one point, I was all ready to wrestle Si to the bed to stop him from going in!) but it worked because she slept soundly for the rest of the night.
And this evening, it only took 10 mins of crying. Fingers crossed she doesn't feel the need to wake later on!
Ralph - my hero!
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