Oh, Ryley Roo… such a sweet, innocent, stubborn little girl! Surely there are many cases where kids sleep in their parents’ bed until their 3 1/2 years old, maybe longer. She’s been in our bed nightly until recently; we basically decided that enough was enough and Jenn put a plan in motion! She had heard from a friend of a friend that used a ‘sleep trainer’ not long ago with success, so with a ‘what can it hurt’ attitude Jenn made the call to Precious Moments Babeez and got us hooked up with a sleep specialist named Emma Campbell (aka our savior!).
(Above: Ryley Roo during the ‘calm before the storm’ that was the first night of sleep training, and a shot of her room after we temper-tantrum proofed it by removing most things she could throw or knock over!)
Here’s the sleep training in a very generalized summary: we made her room a safe place for her to wig out (removed projectiles), turned the lock around on her door (so we can lock it from the outside), then proceeded to put her to bed when it was time (after stories, etc.) and simply left the room after saying goodnight. Did she completely lose her mind the first few times? Oh yes, and understandably so. But we followed Emma’s careful plan – only going in at certain intervals to calm her a bit but not talking to her – and as the hours went by the intervals got longer between until eventually she would fall asleep for the remainder of the night. It was a long first night, but we all did well and after about three or so nights she was pretty much good with the situation and sleeping on her own with only little resistance! Success!
There were a few keys to Ryley’s success – one of them being the rewards system Emma had devised. We started the training with Emma’s help on the 13th of April (a Saturday night), the first week we were giving her little rewards every morning for staying in her room all night (like she had a choice with a locked door!) and she’s get a ‘big’ reward after every three or so nights. The second week we tapered this off and as of now she’s pretty much done with the rewards.
Some of the big rewards involved things like a ‘glow-y bath’, Sushi with Mom, a ferry ride, and a pony ride as pictured below…
The support we received from Emma was excellent – with today’s technology we were in touch basically every evening via text (WhatsApp) from the time she went to bed until morning. If she woke up, Emma would need to know so we’d be texting at 3am sometimes, constantly updating her with Ryley’s status for those crucial first three days. Sometimes I would take an audio clip and send it over as well so that Emma could hear how Ryley was crying.
We kept in close contact until about the 20th (so about a week), I have a complete log of our texts – between the three of us there were 1,187 texts sent back and forth in that time frame (again, this was only from evening until morning). Wow.
As of this post, she’s been doing well – though she still isn’t keen on waking up in the morning and seeing the door shut (as she knows it’s locked). We are keeping her in her room until 7am; to help her with this we have got her a ‘Gro-clock‘ that basically is an alarm clock that has a glowing illustration some sleepy stars on it for nighttime, then it turns into a bright yellow sun at 7am so she knows it’s time to get up!
It may not be 100% yet, but we have about three years of bad habits to undo so we can’t complain… yet! ;0) Hooray for Ryley Roo! And hooray for more space in our bed!