Controlled crying

My girls seem to be taking in turns to not want to go to bed at night. I decided to day to try 'controlled crying' But Erynn has been screaming for the last 20 mins (with two resettles) and doesn't seem to want to let up. I feel like a BAD MUMMY! I just don't know what else to do, I really want the girls to get the idea that they stay in bed at night ...

Any advice??? I am kinda at my wits end.

When I Say screaming, I mean she is really going for it, she is one angry baby. (They are five months old)

She's still only young, I don't think I could have done CC with my boy at that age, I would have found it too hard listening to my baby scream!

I'm of the mindset that generally babies of that age wake when they need something - even if it is just a cuddle and a bit of reassurance.

Are they waking a lot at night? For feeds or just needing resettling or something else?

There's lots of other things you can try if CC doesn't feel right for you

I now have her on my lap. CC certainly didn't work. They just won't sleep, I put them to bed at 7.30pm and often they wake up an hour later and won't sleep again until 10

Fingers crossed they grow out of it!

Mmm, thanks Kelda. I don't think will let her get that upset again. Erynn does seem to be the one who sleeps late and wakes late. Maybe I will just start getting them both up at 7am haha. She finally went back to bed, but only because she was tired and ready to sleep.

Jake went through a phase of that and then sorted himself and then is coming out the other end of it again now.

For him he just wasnt tired.. so we rejigged he day naps and he started going to bed nicely again. Perhaps they are needing a little less sleep during the day?

I did CC with Ty when he was 6 months... It didn't feel right doing it before then. He SCREAMED for 3 hours the first night, about 1hr the second night, and then about 10 mins the 3rd night. Ever since then he's been fantastic. I followed the Contented Little Baby routine... which worked wonders.

Yeah I'd say less sleep during the day. We have been dealing with something similar here (when Ava was about 10 months). I'm guessing she was under tired which then led to over tired as she couldn't get herself to sleep.

Good luck with Plunket

We do controlled crying with DS. (didn't realise thats what it was called until now )
We do it cause if we didn't we'd be up with him all night trying to not let him cry.

But what we do is let him cry for 10 minutes, pick him up without talking to him, let him settle back down in our arms (you can feel their bodies relax in your arms), then put him back down and time another 10 minutes.
We usually only have to do it twice and then he's off to sleep. It's important to time the 10 minutes cause it's easy to feel like they've been crying forever when really it's only been 3-4 mins.

In saying that, if we feel his crying is going beyond reasonable (IE: distressed, etc) we'll pick him up before the 10 minutes is up, settle him and then try again.

It's important for us to not talk to him while we're doing this otherwise it just stimulates him and we end up back at square one.

It's definately not an easy thing to do. I guess for us it's easier as for the first few weeks we dealt with Colic, 2 hours minimum non stop every night of him screaming in absolute agony. So now when he cries, it doesn't seem anywhere near as bad as what his Colic cries were, so we can handle it, IYKWIM.