I feel bad for not feeling bad
Here’s the updated version:
TLDR: 5 month old, isn’t feeding to sleep. Accidentally did Ferber tonight and it worked — he was asleep in 30 min. Feeling surprisingly okay about it. Am I a monster? Where to go from here.
My son is 5 months old. Sleep has been pretty good overall — some nights he goes 7-7, other nights he’s up twice, but I can’t complain. We always feed to sleep and transfer. Drowsy but awake occasionally works but mostly doesn’t — he needs to be fully out.
Over the last month bedtime has gotten harder. He doesn’t always fall asleep on the bottle, started waking on transfer, false starts, the whole thing.
Tonight he had a full bottle, was clearly exhausted, but kept fighting sleep. I put him down and he was just thrashing — overtired. I felt overwhelmed, walked out, and told myself I’d give him 5 minutes.
That turned into an impromptu Ferber. He cried on and off for the first 10 minutes, I checked in, he cried harder, I waited 15 more, checked in again — and at exactly 30 minutes he fell asleep on his own, no pacifier. We’d planned to wait until 6 months but it just felt like time.
Here’s the thing — I thought I’d be the mom who fell apart watching her baby cry it out, but I wasn’t. I got stressed, sure, but it felt right and I was confident that he could do it. Once he was asleep though, I felt awful and just wanted to go cuddle him and tell him I love him.
So my questions:
Is something wrong with me for not finding it harder than I did? I read about how so many women need to physically leave the house or sob along with their baby.
And going forward — do I keep at this until he can go down awake without the paci, or do I go back to feeding to sleep?
Feeling lost.