The No Cry Sleep Solution

How old was your baby when you used The No-Cry Sleep Solution?
Nine months

How old is your baby now?
15 months

When you first met Elizabeth, what was your sleep situation?
Nathaniel slept with us most of the night and woke four to six times a night, sleeping a total of eight or nine hours at night, with two to three restless half-hour to one-hour naps.

How is your baby sleeping now?
Now he sleeps 11 to 12 hours at night without waking. He sleeps in his own room in a crib and is in transition from two two-hour naps to one three-hour nap. He still nurses to sleep for bedtime and naptime, but we have never had an issue with that.

What makes Elizabeth’s ideas so unique?
Her ideas are much more gradual than [those of] most books, which expect change in a day or two. It was three months for us before we reached a steady streak with no night wakings. It also helped to have an exhaustive list of things to try (instead of just one idea — crying — as found in most books).

After your baby was sleeping through the night, did you have any times when she/he suddenly started waking up again? What did you think? What did you do?
We have had days when he wakes up again but we just make sure he’s warm enough. On occasion, he gets hungry at night if he ate poorly during the day, but Mommy’s milk fixes that.

Do you help other parents with sleep problems now?
I have lent a copy of my book to a number of friends, and they have all been very happy with the results. I have had lots of people ask where this book was when their babies where newborns so they could have avoided some of the mistakes we’ve all made. I know so many people who were still waking up five or six times a night with babies six to 12 months old who had no idea what to do to get out of that cycle. What a blessing for moms at their wits’ end.

Excerpted with permission by McGraw-Hill Publishing from The No-Cry Sleep Solution (McGraw-Hill, 2002).

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