Getting baby to sleep

I really wanted to talk about sleep and more importantly getting your baby to sleep. Luke has always been a great baby. You can take him anywhere, he is so sweet and mellow. At home obviously he plays like the wild child he is, but he doesn't get upset when he has to wait in line somewhere or when we go out to eat. The only thing that has kind of been a little bit of a problem is sleeping.

When he was a newborn he would not sleep in his crib. He would only sleep lying on my chest. After a few days of this (on top of having just given birth to him), I was exhausted. I have already talked about this in my baby must-haves so I won't go into it too much but a co-sleeper and a white noise bear helped with getting him to sleep. We still had our sleepness nights now and again but they weren't the rule anymore.

When we moved Luke to his room and he had to start taking naps in his room and go to bed before we would go to bed, and he started to sleep badly again. Once he was asleep he was kind of ok but getting him to sleep was a whole other story. He would scream and cry for up to an hour and eventually just fall asleep exhausted. During the day this was a really big problem, it made me feel so helpless. In the evenings, he would either fall asleep while I fed him or he would scream for hours. We would try everything, rocking him to sleep, sitting with him and quietly sing to him, letting him scream,...

I knew that rocking him to sleep or letting him fall asleep while feeding was not the answer but I did this for a while because it made me feel so much better than hearing him scream for an hour. It took until he was over six months for me to find the problem and it was so simple. For weeks I thought that it was my job to make sure he fell asleep. When he talked in his bed for too long I would go in and give him his pacifier. When his pacifier would fall, i would go in and give it back,... And he would cry as soon as I left the room. And then I started doing some research and found that babies talk away everything they did and saw before they fall asleep as a way to relax after all those stimuli. And I started thinking about it and applying it to myself. If I'm trying to fall asleep and someone would come in and check up on me every 5 minutes, I wouldn't be able to fall asleep either.

Once I realized that I didn't need to help him fall asleep and relaxed a bit more, things got so much easier. Of course I had to work on it a bit because Luke wasn't used to falling asleep on his own. The first few days I put him down and let him talk and cry a little until he started really crying. Then I would walk in, put him back under his sheets, give him his pacifier and leave. I never said a word and I tried not to look him in the eye. Sometimes I had to do this a few times and other times, he would fall asleep after the first time. Gradually he stopped crying so hard and I wouldn't have to go back so much. And now he just talks for a few minutes or 15 minutes depending on the day and then he falls asleep. At times I might have to go in once just to put him back under his sheets and give him his pacifier but then he will fall asleep within minutes.

The most important thing that changed everything has been my feelings about him sleeping. I was so focused on how much he should sleep and it stressed me out. Now I just think, " he'll fall asleep eventually and if he doesn't than he will sleep a little more later" and I really think Luke feels better about going to sleep now that I feel less stressed.