Last night, Jacob work up around Midnight and after approximately 30 attempts to escape he was back down for good at 1:20 AM. More so than most babies, Jacob has been a challenging sleeper. At about 4 months old, we were emotionally and physically spent. He would eventually go to sleep after 30-60 minutes of holding, but he woke up at least 2 times during the night and required a similar experience to get back down.
 Our eyes were opened to a solution when reading  Dr. Richard Ferber's famous book "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems". Famously or depending on your point of view infamously depicted during "Meet the Fockers", the Ferber method was developed to teach your child how to sleep on his own. I was predisposed to believe Jacob would be a bad sleeper because I was one and have heard numerous stories of my challenging bedtimes from my parents.
I am one who needs to understand the mechanics and philosophy of an idea before I can totally buy in to it. Fortunately, Dr. Ferber provide some excellent research and analysis into his method. Most notable and important to me was his discussion on sleep associations. In describing a young child named Betsy and her sleeping problems:
The fact that she could fall asleep rapidly in her parents' arms was proof that she had no actual sleep impairment. There could be no inherent abnormality in her ability to sleep which would allow her to fall asleep quickly in her parents' arms but not alone in her crib. The inability to settle alone in her crib was due to her experience, her sleep associations.
This was a revolutionary idea to me and when you are getting less than 5 hours sleep a night (me not Jacob) you need ideas which are revolutionary. Jacob could sleep fine, but his sleep associate was being held. I had to break him of this sleep association and move to something else.
We followed Dr. Ferber's approach and in about 3 nights (Night 1 and Night 2 were hard) he was able to sleep in his bed as a 5 month old. He did need his pacifier, but it worked fine through early 2s. Shannon and I got rest and Jacob did as well.
This worked until a little before 2 1/2. At that point, Jacob learned he could get out of the bed and open the door and encounter freedom. He expressed his freedom of waking up Mommy and Daddy. We decided this would be a good time to remove pacifiers as their original purpose was to get him through the night and now something more was needed. Breaking that habit was not too tough, but we had to substitute staying in the room with him as he fell asleep. Shannon and I felt that would be a stopgap measure where once the pacifier habit was gone we would no longer have to stay with him to fall asleep.
As you can tell from the beginning of this post, he has latched on to us being in the room as his sleep association. We are now back to square one but at least with the knowlege this can be repaired. Last night, I told him he could get up if had too - I didn't want to make him fearful of leaving the room for good reasons - but if he was OK, Daddy was going to put him right back into bed. Which I did numerous times last night. As before, it will take a few nights to learn his own sleep association to get himself to sleep. Without an external aid, like a pacifier, it may even take the whole week. But by next Friday, I expect him to be sleeping through the night. If not, I am calling in DeNiro.
I know a tried and true method of producing sleep in a two year-three year old child, well at least in the parent if not the child. Simply lie in bed with said child who has a hold of several strands of your hair which he has tightly curled around his fingers. Then tell him repeated stories in which he is a hero rescuing a dog named Susie from various dangerous situations. This boy rides his mo-cycle to the rescue and is sometimes helped by his Uncle Charles who is thrust into the role of this boy's sidekick. After about an hour of storytelling,the boy or the parent or both with be fast asleep. This is a true method of sleep inducement,and I can personally attest to its reliability.
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