Book Review: The Sleepeasy Solution: The Exhausted Parent's Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep from Birth to Age 5

First of all, these 2 authors are amazing! I am finally a well rested, happy mother again! My son had H1N1 last summer when he was 7 months old, then afterwards had chronic colds and ear infections so it really messed up his sleep. On top of that my husband deployed to Afghanistan, and I moved back with my mom. So my little guy had a lot of stuff going on all within 2 months. Well ALL of these changes really confused his sleep cycle. He was waking up every 2-3 hours, and staying awake for anywhere between 1-4 hours. I was getting very little sleep, and thus was tired and cranky and he was tired and cranky. We were not a happy pair! Finally, after my husband came home, and we got settled into a regular routine as a family again we started to attempt sleep training. What a disaster that was! We tried rocking him to sleep, feeding him a nice snack before bed, having a sturdy routine, etc. The worst was letting him cry it out. Well he cried, and cried and cried...then threw up continued crying and started gagging/choking on his own throwup. We didn't try that again. Finally, I did an online searches about getting babys to sleep, went onto different blogs etc and stumbled upon this book :The Sleepeasy Solution: The Exhausted Parents Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep from Birth to Age 5. Amazing. When they say results in less than 1 week, they mean it!

I read a couple of different chapters, (the ones that most applied to us), and started applying them. We started a new routine, snack, brush teeth, rock and sing 1 song, read 1 book then say a prayer and down in the crib. We let him cry for 3 minutes, then went in gave him a hug held him until he stopped crying then laid him back down. I was prepared to do this for hours. 45 minutes later he was asleep, and only woke up once! When he woke up, I sang him his song and laid him back down and he slept until 6:45 am. It was the most sleep both of us had gotten in weeks! The 2nd night he only took 30 minutes to fall asleep and didn't wake up at all, 11 straight hours of sleep! He was such a different baby that day! He was happy, and loved life, gave me lots of love, and was having fun again. (I must admit, I was the same way!). By the end of the week, he was falling asleep in under 5 minutes (we didn't even have to go back in his room after laying him down the first time!). He sleeps so much better now, even for his nap he goes right now, and now he even points to his room and says "mama ny ny" (his way of saying night night) when he's ready.

Jennifer Waldburger and Jill Spivack (the authors) truly take in the feelings, frustrations and fears of the parents. They help you decide what is best by giving you different options and different ways of combining methods and techniques to have a truly personalized sleep plan for you and your baby. This is my baby sleep bible! I recommend this to anybody who has even a slight sleep problem with their baby, with growing, teething, new environment etc...this book has tips for getting great sleep during all of these milestones! Love it!