How Sleep Training Has Changed Our Marriage

My husband and I decided to start sleep training our baby when he was about three months old. We made this decision because he was going to bed around 10:30. He was sleeping in until 9:30 a.m. so as a new mama, that was a plus for me. The downside was that we had to stay up until 10:30 and were never getting time together as a couple.

I did a lot of research on different ways to sleep train, and talked to quite a few parents to see what they did in order to figure out the best route to allow our baby to sleep the best he could.

The first few nights that we decided to put him to bed earlier, we did not make any progress. He just cried, fussed and generally needed to be held until 10:30 like normal.

Throughout the first week we were able to make some progress by slowly getting him ready for bed around 10, hoping he would fall asleep soon after. I had been still nursing before sleep at this point, which I began to cut out. I decided that if he was able to differentiate sleep from eating, then sleeping we would be able to make progress faster.

Throughout the second week, I was feeding him on his normal schedule, while trying to not end the day on the feeding minutes before bedtime. We were able to start getting him ready for bed still around 10, and he was falling asleep close to that same time.

By the time the third week rolled around we implemented a new bedtime routine that made everything about bedtime even easier for us. We fed our little one before bed, then put on his jammies and read him a story. It took that entire week of following through with that routine as well as consistently doing the same steps whether it was mine or my husbands turn to put him to bed. We were finally able to get him to bed by 9:20-9:40.

During the fourth week, we continued to follow the same routines, attempt to put him to bed earlier and we also became consistent on what we would do if he was fussy or woke up in bed. At first, it was hard to not run to his crib any time he moved, or made a sound. Then, slowly we learned that we needed to allow him time to figure things out on his own. We gave him a minute or two to start when he was fussy before rushing to him, allowing him time to self-soothe. This gave us the chance to notice that he was able to get himself back to sleep if he woke up. It took time and patience to work up to letting him work out falling back to sleep on his own, but again, it has been worth it!

The next few weeks sort of blended together and here we are about eight weeks into the sleep training and our baby goes to bed consistently between 8 and 8:30. We still follow the same routine, no matter what is happening in our day, who is visiting or where we are. The routine has helped our baby rely on our cues to know when it is time for bed.

We have been given a treat of time together throughout all of this. I cannot tell you how many nights we talked about how we wished he went to bed just a little bit earlier. When we first started to sleep train our baby, those first few nights when he went to bed before 10 we were so excited! It gave us a half an hour of time together before we headed up to bed.

In the beginning we used that time to catch up on cleaning or dishes, but slowly we have learned to savor those moments. We have his monitor nearby, and we are constantly checking on him, yet we can have conversations with each other and enjoy each others company. We have had game night dates where we play board games on the couch, or movie nights (those generally take a couple of nights to finish!), or nights where we watch a favorite sporting event together.

There are not enough words to adequately convey how much better our marriage has become, since we now have time to just be a couple again. This is not all to say that we do not still have nights were our babe doesn’t want to sleep or nights where he is fussy and we have to spend a little more time putting him to bed, yet it has all been worth it. There are still nights when we have to go to him and rub his back or even pick him up to soothe him back to sleep. Those nights have become fewer and farther in between and in a way I am sure one day we will miss his snuggling into us and falling back to sleep, but for now we are ever so grateful that we took the steps to allow our marriage to become important again.

I would 10/10 recommend sleep training to any new parent, but I would also say to wait until you are ready and do what feels right to you. We could not get on board with letting him cry it out when he was so young, so we slowly worked our way into becoming comfortable with him fussing a little bit every now and again. We found our new normal and created our routine, that does not mean it will work for everyone, just that it has opened up a world of date nights and rekindling conversations with my husband…something that two months into having our baby here I needed more than ever.