Sleep!

I know it just seems like yesterday that I posted Leo's 6 month updated and admitted that we weren't quite there yet with the sleep schedule.... but in the past 2 weeks something miraculous has happened!
Leo has started sleeping the entire night through!! 10, 11, even 12 hours!

So what changed?
Well.... I got a little tough.  (In addition to maintaining a schedule and bedtime each night and allowing him to fall asleep on his own)
I wouldn't say that we did the Cry It Out Method because that is just a little too sad for me to handle, but I did let him cry some...
I began this a couple months ago making him stretch his feedings out in the night.
I did this by when he would wake up, say around midnight, I would go in and comfort him, but not feed him.  Usually this was patting him and offering the pacifier, but sometimes I rocked him.  After a while he realized I wasn't going to feed him and fell back asleep........... or fought it majorly and screamed bloody murder until I gave in and fed him.  We had both.

Eventually he began sleeping longer and longer until we hit about a 6 hour plateau.
I was fine with the 6 hours because he's still a baby and there's always that nagging feeling in the back of your head that maybe he really is hungry and what kind of mother would I be if I was denying my baby food?!

Well at 6 months a normal, healthy baby can safely go 12 hours without food.
So when he got a little older Lee suggested we get a little tougher and teach him that he could go longer and longer.
So once again I began comforting him without food, which sometimes meant crying... there were 2 nights that there was a lot of crying, or it seemed more like screaming.  He wasn't sad. He was MAD.

But after 2 nights of that he stopped waking up for that middle of the night feeding and saved it for morning, which I am happy to do.  For close to 2 weeks now he's been waking between 5:30-7:30 to eat!  If it's more like 5:30 I'll bring him to bed with me and feed him and snuggle for another couple hours.  If it's 7:30 he'll be up for the morning.  To tell the truth I actually prefer the early morning feeding because I love falling asleep with him next to me, and Lee is usually up around 5:30 so we have the bed to ourselves.


Now that he's sleeping through the night it seems like the perfect time for him to start teething and screw it up...