After recovering from the past illness, Connor has returned to sleeping better again, sometimes only waking up once each night.  But the last 4 nights, for some reasons, he was waking up often.  He just wanted to be held, sometimes it would take a few tries before I could put him back to the crib.  So I decided that it was time for sleep training as it would be good for him to learn to sleep on his own.  We had set the date to be today on Friday.  However, I have been dreading for tonight to come.  I was not looking forward to making my happy Connor cried.

     Tonight after the bedtime routine, Connor fell asleep as usual while being fed by me.  When he was done, I decided to brush his teeth to sort of wake him up.  He was quite drowsy but not totally asleep when I placed him in the crib.  As soon as he realized where he was, he started to cry.  I said my good night quickly and left the room.  He continued to cry loudly.  He rolled back and forth a bit in the crib, but not rolling over.  I was watching him on the monitor and listening to him.  His cry was so sad that I could not handle it anymore, so I was doing dishes to distract myself.  At 10 minute mark, I went into the room to quickly tell him that it was ok and he should go to sleep.  Connor stopped crying when he heard me come in; his face was so sad and was begging for help.  But as soon as I walked away from his crib, his sad cry began again.  At 14 minutes, he took a couple of 30 seconds pauses.  Then finally fell asleep at 16th minute.  I was relieved since I might not able to take too much longer of that sad cry. 

     We trained Logan when he was almost 8 months old and it took 27 minutes on the first night of training.  I remembered it was hard listening to Logan’s cry too, but it seemed harder this time.  Maybe because Connor is such a good boy, always smiling through and dealing with everything, that I feel worse putting him through this.