And so it begins...our sleep training journey

I was honestly hoping that we wouldn't get to this point.  I was hoping that Natalie would miraculously reverse her bad sleep habits and sleep through the night.  Obviously, that hasn't happened.  She is 9.5 months old and as of late, is sleeping worse than she was at one month old.  At one month she was waking on a consistent schedule, every 3 hours.  Now every night is a guessing game, she is up once Tuesday night followed by five times Wednesday night.  A mommy-blogger/twitter friend Sarah recommended Sleep Easy a few months back.  She had wonderful success and swears by the sleep training methods.  It took me a couple more months of no sleep, waking multiple times to nurse Natalie, bringing her into our bed where no one really got quality sleep before I actually purchased the book. I can't put it down, every chapter has something that helps me understand why I need to improve Natalie's sleep habits and to do so I must make some changes.

The principle is to not 'reward' the crying at any point.  Tonight I am planning to attempt to beat Natalie to the 'wake up' punch by setting my alarm and dream feeding her.  If she wakes before the scheduled times, she will have to cry.  We will go in and check on her at consistent intervals so she knows we haven't abandoned her, but we will not reward her behavior by giving in and picking her up.  Part of the problem is that we have always given in with her, it is the easy way out at 2:00 am, she eats for 5 minutes and drifts back to sleep.  More sleep for all, win-win right?! Not at all since she has increased the number of feedings at night, relying on me to help her back to sleep.  It's now time for her to learn to put herself back to sleep.

I put her to bed an hour earlier than normal, she went to bed wide awake.  She cried hard for 5 minutes then fussed for another 6 minutes before drifting off to sleep.  This was nearly two hours ago.  She is still sleeping, She has always been able to initially go down on her own, the problem has been in the middle of the night.I am praying harder than ever that it is only a few days of torture training for her and she will have successfully learned how to put herself back to sleep.

I have all my supplies ready, my journal, clock and book (it has a section for panicking, it's bookmarked).  I would really appreciate prayers and encouragement as we begin what we hope will be better sleep for all.