All you need is sleep.

Nursing had become an addiction of sorts; there was no way baby was giving it up without a fight. It was time for a nursing intervention. Baby, your boob addiction has affected your father and I in the following ways: 1) You will only fall asleep laying in mom's arms, while gently sucking. 2) Dad cannot help when putting you to bed and cannot help when you wake up 3) Mom is feeling a little overwhelmed and a bit like an open milk buffet.

This had to end. We decided that although I would still nurse baby during the day, the nighttime feedings could be dropped. We bought the "No Cry Sleep Solution" book and decided to give it a go. The idea behind the book (aside from not allowing your child to cry it out, duh) is that baby is slowly weaned off the expectation of the breast when he wakes up. The method is as follows: let baby suck until milk comes in. Baby vigorously sucks. When sucking slows, gently break latch. Baby will squirm, wait 60 seconds, then place baby back on the breast. Count to ten, then remove and repeat the process until baby eventually falls asleep without the nipple. Surprisingly, it only took about three tries and baby was sound asleep. I was stunned. Part of the routine was also to keep an active log book of when baby wakes up (honestly, was it necessary to write down the time every two hours??) but actually (and more depressingly), baby was waking up more frequently than that. The little notebook I kept beside my bed looked something like this:

Day 1: 8:45 9:36 12:03 2:24 4:15 6:27 7:09

Ugh. The situation seemed more dire when we saw it written on paper like that. Really, how can one little body wake up that much? Didn't baby get how good sleep could be? Why oh why had he not inherited his parents love of sleep?

The process of getting baby off the nighttime boob was a painful one. Sometimes it would take try after try to get baby to drift back to sleep, often causing my own body to resign to the fact that it must be the morning and therefore I couldn't fall back asleep myself. I often looked at my bedside clock at the numbers that would glow 4:13am and groan. I was anxious, anticipating baby's next awakening. Christ, now I needed a sleep intervention.

The method was met with some success. Baby slept his first sleep cycle the longest yet, sometimes for 5 hours. When he finally woke up the first time, (breaking the sleep seal much like going to the bathroom at a bar for the first time after drinking for a few hours) he was up every 2-3 hours after that. However, napping was finally making an appearance and I could handle waking up 2-3 times a night. After a few weeks, baby did what can only be described as a "sleep plateau." He was no longer satisfied with me gently breaking the latch and going back to sleep. His little lungs began to exert their power and I am certain that it was at this time when the neighbors decided we were not getting a Christmas card that year. Although Dad was still putting baby to bed with success, the nighttime awakenings became louder and more frequent. We needed another plan.