Sleep Training Struggles

Isaac has been sleeping "through the night" for a few weeks already. The problem? His longest sleeping stretch starts somewhere from 12-3am (lasting 5-7 hours)!

In addition, he was very cranky as the evening progresses on. Adding a very tired Daddy at the end of the day, and the result was a nightly disastrous "squaring off" between father and son, with Mommy helplessly watching.

I've been looking for ways to make Isaac go to bed earlier. At the suggestion of another mom, I borrowed Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child from the library. According to the author, Isaac was probably very much overtired in the evening. The book explained babies should be put to bed when they starts to be sleepy but before they're overtired. The list of sleepy signals was a bit of a surprise to me, as I didn't realize them until I read the book. I tried doing that and it worked! Instead of constantly refusing sleep (because we only realized he was sleepy when he has already entered the overtired state), Isaac fell asleep on his own in minutes!

However, other suggestions of the book didn't work as well. Particularly, I was trying to follow the napping and sleeping schedule as suggested by the book. The napping part was fine: Isaac slept through them for the desirable duration in the suggested timeframe. It was the sleep part which was causing headaches: the book suggested putting babies to sleep at no later than 7:00pm, and as early as 5:30pm for sleep-deprived children. (I thought Isaac was probably sleep-deprived, with his dark undereye circles and cranky behaviour.) We tried that, but Isaac just kept waking up even more frequently than during the day. He would sleep for about 45 minutes to 1.5 hours and wake up crying, not knowing how to fall back asleep on his own. Sometimes he wants to be changed, sometimes he wants to be fed, other times he just want to nibble/suck. It usually goes on until 3am, but last night it went on throughout the whole night!

I'm only 1/3 through the book. Hopefully the other 2/3 would help him stay asleep in the evening!