How I get my kids to sleep through the night

 

As a mom of two kids under the age of 3, I am no stranger to being woken up in the middle of the night by my kids. In the early months of my kids’ lives, I spent countless nights getting up 3, 4, or even up to 5 times a night to soothe a baby back to sleep. So today I’m going to give you a little background on my sleep training journey with my kids and the steps I have taken to get my kids to sleep 12+ hours through the night. 

It wasn’t until my first baby was 6 months old that I finally hit my breaking point and decided I had to do something to get him to sleep through the night. He was old enough to where I knew he wasn’t waking up because he was hungry, and that it was simply because he didn’t know how to put himself back to sleep if he woke up in the middle of the night. This is when I began my search for sleep training methods. Sleep training is very important for getting your child to sleep through the night.

The sleep training method I used was a modified version of the Ferber method, which can be a pretty controversial method. If you want to read more about the sleep training process I used you can click here. I am not here to tell you which method you should or shouldn’t use, I’m just telling you what worked for me. There are plenty of other sleep training methods that you might like better, and I definitely suggest doing your research to find what works best for you and your family.

The initial sleep training process took only 3 days before he was officially sleep trained and was sleeping 12 hours through the night. And let me tell you I felt like a completely different person when I woke up the morning of day 4 and realized I got a full night of uninterrupted sleep.

Although different sleep training methods have a lot of differences, one thing that almost all of the sleep training methods do have in common is that they will tell you to; create a bedtime routine and be consistent with it, get blackout curtains for their room, and use a sound machine. By creating a bedtime routine, you are putting into place specific steps that show your babies it’s time to get ready for bed, the blackout curtains allow for you to put them to bed even if the sun hasn’t set yet and the morning sun won’t wake them up too early, and the sound machine helps block out outside noises.

I named my kids’ bedtime routine the 5 Bs of bedtime. The 5 Bs were bath, bottle, book, brush, and bed. To kick off the bedtime routine, I would first start with a nightly bath. Not every bath was the same, some nights he got bubble baths where he would play for a little while then would get washed off and some nights they were quick two-minute baths that were strictly business. Either way, he got a bath every night and that initiated the nighttime routine.

After the bath, we would do a bottle and a book. We would choose a book to read to him while he rocked and drank his bottle. This step really allowed him time to wind down and relax after his bath. As he got older and he no longer drank a bottle anymore, we just dropped that part, but we still read books every night.

After the bottle and book, we then brush his teeth and then lay him down in his bed. When he stopped drinking a bottle before bed, we now just brush his teeth before reading books but if your baby is drinking a bottle before bed you want to make sure you brush their teeth after they drink it.

After he was sleep trained, we simply had to complete our bedtime routine, lay him in his bed while he was tired but still awake, turn on the sound machine and kiss him goodnight. It is so important to make sure you are consistent with their routine, or it can derail the whole process. In this scenario consistency is key!

After being successful in sleep training my first child, I knew exactly what to do the second time around and I now have two kids who sleep 12+ hours a night which makes me a very happy Mama. I hope that you find some useful information from this post and if you have any questions please feel free to ask them in the comments below or send me an email.