1. All the guidelines/suggestions for how much, how often and how long baby should eat and sleep at different ages have been extremely helpful, especially for a first time mom. I found this information very useful to use as a guideline to make sure Little Bug was eating and sleeping enough.
2. I learned about the 45-minute sleep intruder in infants from Babywise. If I hadn’t learned this I would have been totally frustrated when Little Bug was around 3 months old and was consistently waking after only 45 minutes of a nap. Babywise taught me to just let her be and settle back to sleep to finish her nap. Now, at 7.5 months, the 45 minute intruder really isn’t an issue and Little Bug is (overall) a good-napper.
3. I learned about sleep training and it is the best thing ever! It’s tough to do when you start because it does involve crying. I believe sleeping is a skill that must be learned. Several times Little Bug has simply amazed me. We have a video monitor. One night I remember seeing her asleep on the monitor and then the next moment she picked her head up off the mattress, looked around and then laid back down and put herself back to sleep. I was amazed that she could do that! Everyone (babies included) wakes multiple times in the night. Since Little Bug has been trained to sleep, she knows what to do when she wakes without getting all upset, crying out and loosing precious sleep just trying to go back to sleep!
4. The Babywise Mom blog has a very good post about letting baby cry it out responsibly. I never actually “read up” on how to let my baby CIO. Knowing how to do it just seemed like common sense to me. I know letting baby CIO is very controversial but my philosophy was always to only let Little Bug CIO if I knew the ONLY reason she was crying was because she was sleepy. I NEVER EVER even laid Little Bug down for a nap if I knew there was even a slight chance she could be hungry instead of sleepy. I knew that if I did lay Little Bug down for a nap and she cried and cried until I got her to just see if she might be hungry, I would damage the effectiveness of letting her CIO. If done responsibly, CIO really is effective in teaching baby to learn to put themselves to sleep and stay asleep. It’s not for everyone. It’s an all or nothing approach. Doing it one day and not the next won’t be as effective as doing it responsibly on a consistent basis. For Little Bug and me, it works!!
5. I learned the importance of uninterrupted sleep to a baby’s development (which made me realize why it was so important to me to sleep train Little Bug).
6. The Babywise Mom blog is overall a very good resource to be able to identify a problem baby is having and get several ideas for a solution that may solve the problem. Her blog is also a very good resource to find strategies that are, quite simply, clever! For example, before Little Bug could go from 8am to 7am without eating, we did a dreamfeed, which I learned about from the Babywise Mom’s blog. This allowed Little Bug to still go to bed at a decent hour (8:30pm) to get the 10-12 hours of sleep babies need. Then, at around 11pm, Little Bug’s daddy would go into her room, pick her up from the crib and feed her a bottle. Little Bug would stay asleep (for the most part), eat and then go right back to the crib and sleep until 7 or 8am! This worked so well for us because it allowed me to go on to sleep and not have to wake around 2-4am for a feeding since Little Bug couldn’t go more than about 8 hours without a feeding. Dave is a night-owl so he didn’t mind at all staying up to give Little Bug that 11pm feeding. At about 6 months old Little Bug dropped that 11pm dreamfeed. This is just one example of a clever “trick” I’ve learned from reading the Babywise Mom’s blog. There are many more!

- Elaine