Cry-It-Out Method

Tonight we decided to employ the cry-it-out method to see if she would put herself to sleep without waking to feed at her usual 2 hour interval. She was breastfed her usual way and immediately entered her drowsy state around 10pm.

By early morning, she was again crying to feed more. We decided to let her cry but her cries quickly escalated to a full-blown melt down! We tried to ignore her in hopes that she would tire herself out. But her cries grew louder and longer! Her little face turned red with anger as small dots of tears burst from the corners of her eyes. By now she was waving her arms erratically, shoving her hands into her mouth (a sure sign that she's crying for hunger).

My heart was breaking...How long would she cry? How long could I endure this? Even though both Jin and I wore earplugs to muffle the noise, her sharp cries pierced through my earplugs and stabbed my heart.

Jin and I quietly laid in bed, each of us praying that her cries would stop. Jin prayed for the wisdom to help sooth our baby. I later confessed to Jin that my prayers were for the noise to just stop. I even had a fleeting image in my mind of me putting a sock in her mouth.

As the minutes turned into hours, we both knew in our hearts that we accomplished nothing except to royally pissed her off. I decided to lift her from the co-sleeper where she lay onto the bed with us. We swaddled her with a blanket and offered her binkey in an effort to sooth her, but her cries continued. Eventually, Jin and I gave in and fed her a bottle of pumped breast milk and soon she calmed herself into a deep slumber. This was our first official mistake as parents and our first lesson learned. We read of the cry-it-out strategy in various baby books and although our instincts told us otherwise, we let instructions in a book dictate how we responded to our baby. Lesson #1: Always follow your instincts over instructions in a book.