CIO in the middle of the night?

How did you do CIO for nights. Getting to bed is easy. They get baths, then a final bottle, then to bed drowsy but normally awake. They tend to fall asleep on their own. I may have to go replace a pacifer once or twice. However middle if the nights are a different story. I have to play the pacifer shuffle. DD still eats once a night which I don't mind but would like to stop. Whn DS wakes up I almost always end up rocking him b/c he starts fussing really loudly. Also he eats about 5:00 buy won't go back to sleep for like another hour in which he sleeps for about only one more hour. I'm almost ready or CIO and not go get them at night. I have a four day weekend next week so I'm thinking about doing it then. But how did you do it? Did you just ignore them until they went back to sleep? Did you do am extension? What about waking the oher up? How I'd yoi know it wasn't a dirty diaper or not feeling well? Any advice or tricks would be appreciated. I'm ready for a full nights sleep.

 

I've posted many times on this forum with my story.. which was very similar to yours.. we had a major paci problem... one night I counted how many times we replaced dropped pacis and it was more than 25 times... my girls were also swaddled and busting out of them and getting mad when they knocked the pacifier out of their mouths. We went cold turkey.. no pacifiers, no swaddles, laying flat in their cribs. We did separate them so that they wouldn't wake the other up at first and the once we got through about a week and they were actually STTN we put them together and they have slept welll ever since... now naps were a different story.. It took about 3-4 nights of on and off crying.. we were at our breaking point with no sleep.. I could seriously not function as a mommy, as a wife, as anything. In my humble opinion.. and this is just from my own experience.. the more you go into them the more it will prolong the crying. We followed Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child to the letter and it worked.. it was hard.. so hard. but my girls actually want to go to bed at night... we also do extremely early bedtimes once we were in the swing of things to make up for all the lost sleep from before... people think we're nuts (my family especially) for being so hardcore about sleep, but hey they don't have twins and they weren't the ones who had 2 very unhappy, unhealthy feeling babies at the time.. now everyone always talks about my girls' pleasant dispositions and I always attribute it to enough sleep.. as far as knowing when to go to them.. I still struggle at times with that. I feel like you have to trust your instincts with their cries.. if they don't feel good the cry is different and chances are that I knew they weren't feeling well before I put them to bed at night. As far as dirty diapers.. if you put them in bed at night and they have a clean diaper.. ask yourself if they usually have poopy diapers at night.. if they do you can always do the crawl in and sniff from the side of the crib!!! We still change our girls 1x/night before we go to bed bc I can't stand the thought of them waking up too wet.. but most people let them STTN with one diaper.. Good luck to you!!!!

 

We did not have a pacifier problem, but we finally did CIO for nights around 9 months. Our boys would wake constantly and need to be rocked to go back to sleep. We did bedtime and nights together. For bedtime we did intervals - at night, we decided that we would not go get them unless they cried for more than 20 minutes. We actually never had to go that long. The first night, they had a 10 minute crying spell each, and since then, they STTN except when not feeling well. I made sure that they weren't sick or teething when we did this. As far as how can you tell, there is just a different sound to the cry. I only get up and check on them if they sound frantic or in pain - trust your instincts in that. Our boys often cry out once or twice in the middle of the night, but then go right back to sleep - especially right now when they are cutting teeth. But in general, things have gotten SO much better. I resisted CIO for months - we should have done it much, much sooner!!

 

how old are your LO's? IMO, I wouldn't do CIO younger than 6 months

We did CIO at 8 months due to Em waking every hour looking for paci and comfort. We had to give up paci's, because she couldn't find and put one in her mouth so when it fell out and she cried, she didn't get one any more. I would start it right at bed time (meaning no replacing the paci 1 or 2 times). Do your routine, put them down with paci if you want, but after the door closes, that's it, let the CIO begin. We used sleep sacs to keep them warm but free to move without getting cold when blankets would fall off them. The first night they cried about 25 minutes, next night 10 minutes or so, third night only a few minutes. we threw out all the paci's and that was that.... of course we've done CIO with them many times since that point but it's always worked to resolve the night wakings, even at almost 3... good luck.