valerah said: How did you get Olive to sleep alone in her crib? We are starting the transition now (7 weeks) and its not as easy as I’d hoped!

Hmm, we never really did a formal transition. Olive was so sleepy in the beginning (I think because she was 2.5 weeks early) that she’d sleep anywhere, so she was in her crib a fair bit for naps, and nighttime too.

She did sleep with us for a few nights at first, but Adam was extremely uncomfortable with having her in the bed with us – he was (and still is) terrified of rolling over on her, and although I loved having her with us (what’s better than a snuggly sleeping baby?), I had to admit that I had the same worries. 

Sleeping with her in the bed with me meant that I never slept deeply. I was always subconsciously aware of where she was, and where I was in relation to her, and that I had to not fall asleep so deep that I rolled over in the night and smushed my baby.

But nonetheless, in the beginning she would start the night in her crib, because that was her longest stretch of sleep (around 4 hours usually) and then when she woke up I’d would take her with me into the guest bedroom to feed her and just sleep with her there because she was nursing every few hours anyway.

Eventually as her stretches of sleep got longer and longer, and she was doing two, four hour stretches, I’d just nurse her and put her back into the crib when she was done.

Now she usually falls sleep while I’m nursing her for the last time each night and we put her in her crib and she sleeps the whole night in there, and also most naps when she’s at home. But I have to say that if she hated being in her crib, or woke up crying every time she was in there I think I would have brought her back into bed with me. I’d hate to think that she was lonely or missing her mama, but she seems to be just fine. We do have to put her down asleep though, she’s not yet at the point where she can soothe herself to sleep. We definitely have times (mostly during the day) when we put her in the crib and as soon as you lay her down her eyes pop open and she cries.

So, in conclusion to this long-winded, disjointed ramble: Because we didn’t really have a plan at all, I’m not sure what advice to give. And as we have all learned, advice is probably useless anyway. But maybe make sure baby is sleeping before putting him down (like, dead asleep, zombie sleep where you can lift an arm and drop it and he doesn’t even move), and then he’ll get used to being in the crib when he wakes up, and might associate it with sleep? Or swaddle him? Sometimes we’d put a warm (like 1 minute in the microwave) magic bag in Olive’s crib to ease the transition from our warm arms to the cool crib sheets. I’m not sure I’ve helped at all, but I’ve babbled long enough. Good Luck!