I get asked this a lot! Simple answer is, YES we do 😊 How?

We started sleep training him just recently after 6 months old coz he can already babble and know how to call out for people, so we’re comforted by the fact that he’s capable to scream should he be in any pain. Why not before 6 months? Simply because tak sampai hati to hear him cry.

Aiman and I tend to sleep very late and with Yusuf always with us, he also ended up sleeping very late and this would either cause him to:

1. be unsettled/overstimulated by the time Aiman and I are ready to fall asleep
2. be cranky during the day coz he wants to play but he’s tired (as it is he’s already a very very active boy, so cranky and active combined….goodluck teachers! 😂)
3. wakes up at random/odd hours in the morning which meant that we needed to wait for whatever time he wakes up before we could plan our day

So how did we start the sleep training? We did a set of exact same routine daily per the advice we got from his Paeditrician and (magically!) after a week he got used to it. Here’s what we did every single day:
– Light dinner
– Warm shower (or shower first then dinner sometimes)
– Switch off all sounds from toys, phones and TV by 7pm
– Read a story book together
– Give him a bottle of milk and transfer him into the cot and say goodnight! (yes, we made it a point to say goodnight in hopes that he would understand that that meant it’s the end of day)
– Let him fall asleep on his own (hopefully)

Don’t worry, in the beginning it wasn’t all a walk in the park. The first few days he cried and screamed to be picked up! So being the people that we are (tak sampai hati dengar his cries), we’d go back into the room and literally told him “we’re hereee, don’t worry”, and slept on the bed next to the cot, but we did not pick him up. Eventually he got used to the same routine that he started falling asleep after transferring him into the cot. Possibly also it’s a function of “I feel safe that mommy and abah are just outside and they will come in should I scream and cry”. No, Yusuf didn’t say that, this is me trying to put myself in Yusuf’s brain lol!!

So now he sleeps by 8pm, sometimes slightly earlier, sometimes just slightly later 😍

Ps: He doesn’t sleep all through the night without waking up, we wake him up to dreamfeed him once before we head to bed (this is also when we change his diaper, usually his eyes are closed) and he wakes up another time on his own for 6 oz of milk usually at around 3am, if not at 5am. Very predictable! The best part is that he wakes up between 6.30 – 7am every morning and I love that it’s early and predictable, which just means that it’s a lotttt easier for us to plan our day 😀

Pps: Different child reacts differently, so don’t expect for the outcome to be exactly the same even after doing exactly the same routine. Get advice from your child’s Paeditrician if need to.