{"id":2078,"date":"2008-07-17T22:24:57","date_gmt":"2008-07-18T03:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/?p=2078"},"modified":"2008-07-17T22:33:23","modified_gmt":"2008-07-18T03:33:23","slug":"how-to-transition-from-co-sleeper-to-crib","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/2008\/how-to-transition-from-co-sleeper-to-crib\/","title":{"rendered":"Our snoozer — or, How to transition from co-sleeper to crib"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite all of my worries and fears, Rosie has taken to her new sleeping regimen like a champ. A very, very sleepy champ. <\/p>\n

_[Editor’s note: We realize this post gives a lot of detail about a process many of you may never need to implement. But as we were working through the process of transitioning our baby from co-sleeping to her own crib, we found that there was precious little information available. We’re trying to fill that gap a little.]_<\/p>\n

It took us a little while to create a “plan”:\/news\/2008\/rosies-big-transition\/ to get Rosie accustomed to sleeping in her crib. But after piecing together advice from friends, tips from books, and some ideas from the internet, we implemented these steps, in this order:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

# Put Rosie in her crib for naps as much as possible (starting around age 3½ months). Put her down when sleepy, 1-2 hours after waking. Let her cry for up to 20 minutes to go to sleep at naptimes.
\n# Continue to co-sleep at night with Rosie in bed. Mama tries to roll over with her back to Rosie to reduce the number of nighttime nursings.
\n# Try to put Rosie in the bedside co-sleeper in the middle of the night. See how that goes.
\n# Set up a room for Rosie. We gave her our room — just for the time being! Someday she’ll move in with Lucy. (See photo, above, as Lucy helped Papa dismantle the grownups’ bed.)
\n# Once Rosie is used to being put in the bedside co-sleeper in the middle of the night, move the whole operation into Rosie’s room, near her crib — co-sleeper, Mama, and all. (We have a daybed set up here, too, which made it easy to use the co-sleeper there.) Mama starts off the night sleeping in Rosie’s room, then at some point steals away to her own bed at night. (See photo, below.)
\n# After a few nights of this, try putting Rosie down in the co-sleeper and leaving at the beginning of the night.
\n# After a few nights of this, put Rosie down in her crib at the beginning of the night.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This whole process went quite smoothly, and much more quickly than I had anticipated — only one or two nights needed for each step. Rosie has amazed us by regularly taking a long nap (often three hours or more) almost every day. We think part of her napping ease may be that she is sleeping on her belly (even though we put her down on her back, but our pediatrician says this is fine). At some point, we also began a regular bedtime routine (bath, pajamas, nursing, and a song) which has probably helped the whole process. <\/p>\n

One challenge has been a bit of confusion on Rosie’s part regarding when we were putting her down for bedtime and when we intended for her to take a nap. Sometimes Rosie would cry after being asleep for only about 45 minutes at night. We had “this challenge”:\/news\/2006\/lucys-troublesome-habit\/ with Lucy, too, so it wasn’t too surprising to us. After determining that she wasn’t actually hungry at this point, we decided to employ a “cry-it-out” policy (as we did with “Lucy”:\/news\/2006\/taking-the-plunge\/). Rosie is still working her way through this bump, but she is doing great — waking up at this point only once every few days, and crying (usually not very hard) for only 10-20 minutes before falling asleep again.<\/p>\n

It was hard to decide to let Rosie cry, just as it was hard with Lucy. But when Rosie was sleepy and nothing else was working, the choice became clear. I was comforted, too, by advice “Deborah”:http:\/\/www.xanga.com\/tomaid gave me when we let Lucy cry herself to sleep two years ago: we can just try it for a week or so, and if it doesn’t improve, we can always change the policy. (But both times it _has_ improved quickly!)<\/p>\n

So, at this point, Rosie is generally going to bed somewhere between 6:30 pm and 7:30 pm each night, getting up for two feedings, and waking up around 7:30 am. Ideally, we’d get that down to one feeding, but I’m pretty happy with the progress we’ve made! Jon and I even went on a date the other night to celebrate. I think Rosie is enjoying the new regime, too — she’s been getting lots more sleep and seems able to stay up a little longer between naps. A girl’s got to have lots of rest to keep on “growing like she is”:\/news\/2008\/our-big-dumpling!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite all of my worries and fears, Rosie has taken to her new sleeping regimen like a champ. A very, very sleepy champ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2078"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2102,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions\/2102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}