"sleep training" and teething

poor boopers. being six months old is tough! first, there's the teething thing. now, i have yet to see a little tooth poke through her gums, but they are definitely getting ready to protrude. most days she copes with teething aches and pains just fine, but for the past few days she's been little miss cranky pants. it doesn't help that she also has a cold, which has been dragging on for over a week.

of course, this is all coinciding with our efforts to "sleep train" aubrey. for the past few months she's been a very good nighttime sleeper. infact, before the move, she would sleep - on average - from 7:00 to 4:30, without waking up for a feed. (this is nothing short of miraculous, considering aubrey hardly ever takes a meaningful nap during the day!)

so, our main issue is not so much getting aubrey to stay asleep all night, but to get her to put herself to sleep without a ton of commotion. and we are attempting to eliminate the early morning waking, especially now that she is in her own room. most nights we are able to put her down with very little fussing. but every few nights, aubrey puts up a fight. after ensuring that she is: (a) not hungry; (b) does not need to burp; (c) dry and warm; (d) not contorted into a bizaare position in her crib in need of rescue, our most recent tactic is...to let her cry it out. so far we've been fortunate in that she usually puts herself to sleep after about 10-15 minutes of crying. but it is TOUGH! man can she wail! and we've found that if we go into her room to comfort her without picking her up, she gets even more pissed off. arg!

last night we had a relatively smooth putting to bed session, but aubrey started screaming very suddenly and very unexpectedly at ten o'clock...almost as if waking up from a very bad dream. (she occasionally does this, and i am convinced that young babies are capable of dreaming.) we went in to check on her (her cry sounded unusual) and i ended up letting her nurse to calm her down. she fell back to sleep quickly without much of a fuss.

but she was up again around 4:30, babbling at first, and then out and out wailing. i went up to check on her: baby parts were in tact and she was dry. she just wanted attention. so i resisted the urge to pick her up and instead, snuggled her blanky around her, patted her in an attempt to soother her (really this just gets her more revved up) shushed a bit and then left her. crying. in her crib. i went down the stairs and crawled back into bed, feeling somewhat guilty, but determined to let aubrey figure this sleep thing out on her own. after about five or ten more minutes of torture (it seemed a lot longer than that...maybe it wasn't even that long...) she stopped crying. almost abruptly. amazing.

what's even more amazing is that pete snored through almost the entire episode.

aubrey stayed asleep until around six, when she started crying again. by this time we were up and getting ready for work, so i got her out of her crib and carried her down to our room. (she was definitely hungry at this point, since she tried to nurse my cheek on the way down the stairs.) i nursed her in our bed and she promptly dropped off to sleep again. i had to wake her up at seven to get her ready to go to daycare.

so...i'm not really sure that my attempts at "sleep training" are going to acheive my desired goal of uninterrupted sleep at night. i am aware of a multitude of "sleep training" theories and techniques. on the one hand you have those that ascribe to the feber method. on the other, you have those that sing the praises of attachment parenting. i have always been the type of person to take the "middle road," and can see advantages and disadvantages with both positions. and there are theorists who adopt a "hybrid" approach to sleep traing. BUT, the problem with these middle-of-the-road theorists is that the "methods" they describe are about as clear as mud. the best that i can gather from them is that you just try different stuff that seems right for you and your family see what the result is. ack! how frustrating when all you really want is someone to say: this is what you should do, follow steps 1 through 4.

if only parenting were that easy, right?