When our first baby was born in 2023, sleep was absolutely brutal.

Homeboy woke up every hour and a half! Once he was down, I would lie down, but with all the postpartum anxiety, it would take me 40 minutes to fall asleep — and then I'd have to wake up again in less than an hour.

It barely felt worth it.

So, for a while there, I gave up on sleeping at night altogether and started staying up instead. I'd watch my boy on the baby cam and clean the house feverishly. (Of course, the only reason I could do this was that my husband or my mother-in-law would get up at 7 a.m. and relieve me, and I would go sleep until 2 p.m. or so. I realize not everyone has this option, and I'm not recommending it anyway.)

That was our life for a few months.

But even after I started trying to sleep at night again, I'd have to get up constantly to soothe my baby.

We got the Nanit baby cam on the advice of our friends, who had had their baby just two months before us. We knew they were both planners and meticulous researchers, so we trusted their judgment.

By far the most alluring feature of the Nanit for us was the breathing tracking. This was a must-have after the gut-wrenching NICU stay we'd gone through when our son was born with complications.

Being able to look up at the screen in the middle of the night, half-asleep, quickly see his breathing rate, and feel reassured that it was safe to go back to sleep was a godsend.

Nanit also had really great analytics with their basic plan (and even more with their premium plans). It tracked when your baby was awake and asleep, when they were picked up from the crib and put back down, and gave you a little summary of total hours slept and number of visits, among other things.

At one point, our Nanit showed that I had visited my baby 11 times in one night.

Eleven.

I sent the screenshot to our friends, and they said, “Wow, you must be really tired today.”

And I was like, What do you mean, “today”? This is a pretty normal night for us.

That was when I realized that we had gone way off course with our sleep situation. Something needed to change. I was exhausted, the time to return to work was looming, and there was no way this arrangement was going to survive that.

Our friends had sleep trained their baby at four months and had great things to say about it. Everyone around us who had babies was basically saying the same thing: you have to sleep train.

Even my amazing boss — whom I loved, respected and looked up to — told me she credited sleep training with saving her marriage.

The problem was that sleep training was something I really wanted to avoid altogether.

Honestly, it sounded so uncomfortable and scary to me. Like, what do you mean, intentionally put my baby down and let him cry?

I was pretty against the whole idea.

I kept hoping my baby boy would just start sleeping through the night on his own, like some of my friends said happened with their babies.

I waited till he got a little bit older.

Then I waited for him to start eating solids, so he could have enough sustenance to get through longer sleep stretches.

But these magical goalposts did nothing for his sleep.

Our boy was seven months old by the time we finally shelled out a couple hundred bucks for a popular sleep training course and decided we'd give it a go.

We watched all the course videos and read all the PDFs, prepped everything, and started night one.

Once we knew we were going to do it, I thought, “Okay, how bad could it be? My baby is so chill. Maybe he wouldn't care so much that I'm not there.”

Famous last words, right?

Our baby cried harder than we had ever heard him cry before.

We checked in on him after five minutes, then after ten, then every fifteen minutes, as the sleep training course advised.

It was brutal hearing him cry. Every fiber of my being revolted against it.

I mean, aren't we basically wired to jump into action when we hear our babies cry? Isn't that our biology?

It was so difficult to fight the urge to rush in and pick him up. It felt like I was doing something wrong — like I was hurting my baby.

The idea was to keep going with fifteen-minute check-ins until the baby self-soothed and fell asleep on his own.

But an hour and twenty minutes (!!! 🥴) into this process, he didn't seem like he was going to self-soothe anytime soon.

It didn't help that we had waited so long that now he could stand up. He would grab onto the crib railing and just stand there wailing.

My husband and I also discovered that we weren't nearly as aligned as we'd thought we were.

He wanted to watch the monitor with the sound on, but I couldn't bear to hear the crying from two sources. During check-ins, he wanted to keep picking him up to a minimum, as the course advised, but I wanted to hold and soothe my baby for as long as possible.

Turns out, there was a lot we probably should've talked through before starting.

By the end of that hour and twenty minutes, I was sobbing too.

I clutched my baby close to my chest and declared that I was done. I was absolutely emotionally wrecked.

I remember telling my husband I would rather eat ten poopy diapers than do that again.

And at the time, I meant it quite literally.

There was absolutely no way I was repeating that experience.

I felt so traumatized by the whole thing that I wouldn't be ready to try sleep training again for several months.

After that experience, we spent months trying alternatives that didn't involve so much crying.

We tried lying down next to the crib and sticking an arm in for him to cuddle up against.

In the morning, if you walked into my son's room, you'd see blankets and pillows on the floor next to the crib, and sometimes my husband's watch would be under there or one of my bracelets.

I joked that a mom detective, seeing that scene, would immediately know exactly what had happened: we’d taken off our watches and bracelets so we could squeeze our arms through the crib railing more easily. 😂

We tried sleeping in the same room on a bed we had in there, but that seemed worse. Every creak the bed made woke him up, and vice versa.

We tried standing over the crib and gently patting his back for as long as our backs could take it. (Lol. It turns out that in your late thirties, this is not actually very long.)

We tried slowly moving farther and farther away from him and eventually out of the room — like the Chair Method, but without the actual chair.

Nothing seemed to work well enough to make him fall asleep predictably or stop the constant night wakings.

Eventually, still living on very little sleep, exhausted and frustrated, we turned to a sleep consultant our cousin recommended.

She shared her pricing, and I was about ready to shell out another couple hundred bucks to get some help.

But my husband pleaded with me to give sleep training one more chance.

And then my husband had an idea.

To try to get me on board, he said, “Why don't we come up with an amount of time we think we can do, and after that, you can just rock him to sleep like you normally do?”

That sounded different.

Instead of going into bedtime not knowing whether the crying would last 20 minutes or two hours, we would decide before we started exactly how much we were willing to do.

I could get on board with that.

So we tried it.

We kept the intervals at five minutes without increasing them. Five minutes of crying felt like something I could handle.

We decided we'd do a total of 20 minutes the first night — four intervals of five minutes each — then 25 the next night, then 30 the night after that.

The idea was that we'd gradually work our way up to handling more total crying time. But it turned out we didn't need to keep increasing it for very long.

The first night, we did our four intervals, and then came the welcome relief: I got to pick up my baby and rock him to sleep the way I normally did. And honestly, it was a lovely way to end the exercise.

More importantly, I knew that if we tried again the next night, I would get to do the same thing again.

There was always an exit. Knowing that made it feel doable.

The second night, we went up to 25 minutes.

On the third night, my baby fell asleep within the third interval (15 minutes in)!

What?!

What do you mean he fell asleep on his own without us having to endure open-ended crying until exhaustion?

To say that we were overjoyed is an understatement. We had reached nirvana, as far as I was concerned!

We couldn't believe it!

Yes, it definitely wasn't a no-crying experience. But you have to understand that life had basically beaten me into believing that enduring unlimited crying was necessary — or I had to go on living like a zombie. So, as far as I was concerned, limited crying was a huge win!

Over the next few nights, still riding the high of that third night's victory, we kept doing the same thing: five-minute intervals plus capped total time. Sometimes our baby boy would fall asleep during the first interval, sometimes the second, sometimes the third.

Within two weeks of practicing this consistently every night, we were able to put him down and walk out of the room for the night.

The sleep-training proponents were right about this: once he learned how to fall asleep on his own, he would do it. Lol — begrudgingly, but he would. 😂

And the night wakings dropped dramatically.

We went from this (these are screenshots from our Nanit app):

To this:

And eventually to this:

When he woke up at night, we'd wait a few minutes before rushing in to see if he would fall back asleep on his own.

Same with mornings. We'd wait a few minutes to see what happened.

And a lot of the time, he would fall back asleep — and we'd all get another blissful hour of rest.

That pause became the key and it became easier with practice.

I think of it now as learning to respond instead of react. (Lol I hear this in my corporate world a lot and it totally applies here too... 🤦‍♀️)

You still respond to your baby. You're just giving them a little space first to exercise their fledgling self-regulating skills.

I'm not a scientist, but if my baby fell asleep without getting so tired that he couldn't cry anymore, maybe crying to exhaustion (or "crying to extinction") is not actually required for sleep skills?

Maybe the mechanism is something closer to:

I'm learning that I can be left alone and not perish.

I'm learning that my parents will come back for me even when they leave.

I'm learning that I'm safe.

I can sleep if I feel safe.

Again, not a scientist or a researcher over here 😂, but maybe there's some room for interpretation here...

At first, every cry made me want to react immediately.

Which is understandable - as a mother, that's what you tune into at the beginning of your baby's life. Every cry means something: they're hungry, they need a change, something is making them uncomfortable, etc.

But as my baby got a little older and we started working on sleep, I realized the way I thought about crying needed to evolve too.

Crying from the discomfort of a parent not being there is not the same as physical danger — provided, of course, that you've made sure your baby is physically safe, fed and dry.

That was a really important thing for me to learn to remind myself. Honestly, it was critical in being able to bear the crying at all.

And it became easier to pause when I knew exactly how long I was asking myself to wait.

I wasn't sitting there wondering, How long am I supposed to let this go on?

I knew: five minutes.

Then I could go check on him.

Knowing what to expect — and that there's a limit — made it possible to get through that.

A year later, in 2024, when we needed to work on sleep with our second baby, we came back to this same approach.

We didn't wait nearly as long to sleep train her as her brother - five and a half months instead of seven. The fact that she didn't know how to pull herself up to standing using the railing helped a lot. She just lay there and it made transitioning into sleep much easier.

We did our five-minute intervals and planned to start with four of them — 20 minutes total — on the first night, just like we had with our firstborn.

Lo and behold, on night one, she fell asleep after 13 minutes (in the third interval)!

We didn't even make it to four intervals!

On night two, she fell asleep after 11 minutes.

And on night three, she fell asleep with no crying at all.

I just laid her down and walked out.

Not a peep!

She soothed herself to sleep.

Her sleep stretches got longer immediately. She slept for six hours straight the first night and seven hours straight the second night.

And it just improved from there.

I think that's when it really registered for us that maybe the first time with our son wasn't just a fluke.

We had landed on a version of sleep training that gave our babies a chance to learn independent sleep, but that was also much easier for us to survive emotionally.

We attempted to wean our babies from night feedings, which went... honestly, inconclusively.

We tried. Then relapsed. Then tried again. Then relapsed again. Mixed results all around.

To cut to the chase: my son is now three years old and he still goes to bed with a bottle of milk — yes, with a nipple on it — and if he wakes up during the night and asks for milk, I give it to him freely. Same with my daughter.

This has resulted in more overflowing diapers and middle-of-the-night sheet changes than I'd like to admit.

(Be sure to buy a waterproof mattress protector if you're going to live this lifestyle. 😂)

But my point is: EVEN WITH THAT — even without us perfectly executing all the supposedly “correct” sleep training things — our babies' sleep stretches still increased dramatically.

A long while later, in 2026, I thought about the whole saga and realized there were probably other parents out there who felt the way I did.

Maybe they hadn't already gone through a disastrous sleep-training attempt like we had.

Maybe they were just standing at the beginning of it thinking:

Yeahhhh... I really don't want to do that.

And since we'd already gone through all the messy trial and error ourselves, I figured maybe writing down exactly what we did could save somebody else the trouble.

The method in the guide wasn't something I learned in a certification program or dreamed up because I saw a "lucrative opening" in the baby sleep market. 😂 We stumbled into it after months of shitty sleep, one spectacularly terrible attempt at traditional sleep training, a bunch of other things that didn't really work, and eventually some creative liberties taken by my husband and me.

So that's what the guide is: the approach that finally worked for us.

Here's the guide if you’d like to try it → Gentle Sleep Training Guide on Gumroad