How Sophia Earned Sleep Training

We have been very lucky with Sophia - she is an extremely happy baby and has been a good sleeper from the beginning.
In the past few weeks, though, she had started to develop this habit of waking up 45 minutes after we put her down for the evening. (It actually started on a night that Dave & I went out to dinner at a friend's house, utilizing the "listening" services of our awesome downstairs neighbors John & Becky. After about an hour of trying to get Sophia to fall back asleep, John called us sheepishly and we returned home. We felt really, really badly!!)

Usually, it wouldn't take much to get Sophia to fall back asleep after this brief wake up. A little rocking, some pinky sucking or nursing and she'd be good to go. And that worked for the first wake up on Monday night. But not the mysterious second wake up at 11:15pm.

I had just settled into bed when I hear Sophia start crying. Screaming, was more like it. We had just started her on rice cereal a few days prior, so I didn't know if she was having tummy issues or what was causing it, as she had never really woken up at this point. I went in and unswaddled her and tried burping her and stretching her legs. She stopped crying but was still very fussy. I tried rocking her, nursing her - I even went back to the old faithful of bouncing her on the ball. She would calm down and just look at me with these big, blue eyes. But she was still pretty fussy. By this point, it's been about 40 minutes. Dave had just gotten home from his soccer game and poked his head in her room (it's always disheartening when you come home to see her door open and hear the white noise machine.) to see how everything was going. He was still kind of in the hallway, so as not to disturb any progress I was possibly making. But because no progress was being made, he came in.

Well, the minute she saw her father, Sophia broke out into the biggest, shit-eating grin (as a side note - why do they call it a "shit-eating grin" - I don't think I'd be grinning if my mouth were full of it!) at the gloriousness of both her mom and dad being around to play with her late night. With that, I promptly kissed her, told her we loved her very much and that she was now going to bed. I placed her in the crib and after a few short minutes of crying, she fell back asleep till the morning.

Dave and I just sat out on the couch for about 30 minutes talking and marveling (without any background noise) about how we had been "had" :) by our almost-6 month old daughter.

The real sleep training, though, would begin the next night. Stay tuned...