You say "fascism" like it's a bad thing ...

Over the years, there have been a number of people who have claimed the title, "Sleep Nazi." One prominent one is Richard Ferber, a sleep expert commonly associated with "cry it out" sleep training. Now, I am not in the business of defending Nazis ... but in the case of Ezra's sleep, we needed someone who'd invade Poland if the mood struck, and not be all wishy-washy about it.

Ferber's method is designed to deal with "sleep association disorder," meaning the child comes to associate something (say, rocking, nursing, lying on a parent) with sleep ... and can't fall asleep without it. One result of that is that if he wakes up, as everyone does a few times a night, and the conditions that he fell asleep to aren't there anymore (i.e. he's no longer being rocked, fed, etc.), he really wakes the hell up. And wakes up his parents. And robs them of their sanity.

Ferber's spiel is "progressive waiting," where you put the kid down awake, let him cry, and check in on him at increasing intervals until he falls asleep. It's one of those things that makes hippie-dippy parents (with whom we have much affinity) gasp and cluck their tongues. The idea that you just leave your child to cry is anathema. And it scared the hell out of us too, frankly. But this weekend we did it. And I'll be damned if it doesn't work.

Ezra's sleep lately has been as chaotic as ever: he'd wake 2-3 times within the first hour or two of going down to bed. Then he'd wake again and again throughout the night -- sometimes 6 or 7 times altogether. His napping was equally unpredictable. So Friday night, with Ferber as our mighty guide, we put him down awake. We feared he would wail all night. In fact, he basically cried for about 35 minutes, then conked out for 4 hours. He got up to eat, then crashed for another 3.5. That, my friends, is progress. More than progress -- it was an outright breakthorugh.

Then last night (Saturday), we put him down at 9:00. He fell asleep with no crying whatsoever .. up for a brief feeding at 2:00 am, then down again tear-free. One more little meal at 6:00 am, and then slept til 8:00. Eleven hours, baby! We are dumbfounded. We're realizing we really must have been holding him back in some ways, because he's taking to the sleep training so well. It's so gratifying to see him figure out how to sleep on his own, without help from us ... then get himself back to sleep when he wakes. We're terribly proud. We definitely feel a touch guilty about the whole thing, but mostly we're thrilled that Ez is starting to get the sleep he needs and will be healthier and happier for it.

One contributing factor to the sleep success has been our newly-solidified bed-time routine. It usually consists of: bath, books, nurse, sack ... with some singing thrown in there somewhere. Here's a little sample of Ash regaling Ezra with "Die kleine Raupe Nimmersatt" ... also known as, The very Hungry Caterpillar, in German.

In other news, we also had some progress on the solid-foods front. We'd been giving him bananas with little success for about a week and a half now. Then Ash's Aunt Nicky suggested going back to good ol' rice cereal (aka gruel) mixed liberally with breastmilk. Last night we gave it a shot. Ez started opening his mouth for the spoon ... making something like chewing motions, and even swallowing a little bit. It was lots of fun, and thoroughly messy. I'm discovering that baby food sets like concrete if you don't clean it up within a few minutes.

Anyway, we're trying not to count our chickens about the sleep thing, but it's hard not to feel like we won the lottery. Thank you, Sleep Nazi!

Great gobs of love,

Gabe, Ash and Ez