Making Him Work It Out

EH turned 18 months old today, and it's almost hard to believe how far we've come.  He's talkative, into everything, a voracious eater and overall a great sleeper.  But he was still waking up one or two times a night and making enough of a fussing noise that the monitor would pick it up and we'd go in and usually just help him find his pacifier, at which time he would promptly fall back asleep.

DH has long been advocating for just letting EH go and make him work it out on his own.  I was fine with that except that even with the monitor off, I hear him when he makes noise in his room, especially at night when it's so quiet.  I'm a light sleeper, and thus no monitor next to DH's head means that I would be the only one waking up to EH's cries each and every night.

But that conversation coincided nicely with the weeks leading up to my birthday, when - trying to come up with birthday suggestions for family members who asked - I mentioned on a whim that I might like a white noise machine for myself (EH has one that he uses every  night.)

So I got the white noise machine - one of the amazing Marpac machines that makes real white noise, not just an mp3 of a white noise sound - and a week later DH pushed once again to go the no-monitor route.  Now I was more willing to try.

We're going on night 4 of turnig the monitor off and our white noise machine on, and so far, it's been going great.  I know that if EH started wailing we would hear him, but so far his peeps and wimpers haven't been enough to wake us up, and we've learned that even when we're not there to help him find his pacifier, he's able to work it out.  I imagine that sometimes he finds it on his own, and sometimes he falls back asleep without it, but it any case, it doesn't require intervention on our part.

So far we've had 3 nights of sleep that didn't require us to get up for EH.  Now if I could just stop drinking so much water before bedtime I might be manage an entire night without one or two wake-ups.....