Is the Era of CIO Upon Us?

Let me say a couple things by way of caveat:

I am not a whackjob with unrealistic expectations.  I do not believe that infants should sleep through the night without eating.  I am willing to recognize that 5:00 am can be a legitimate wake-up time if the kid is well rested.

Right now, my priorities are to get Tiny Boy (and hopefully therefore myself) more sleep, and to get him to sleep in the crib, at least for naps and part of the night.

If you use CIO and it works for your family, great.  If you are a major attachment parenting/co-sleeping advocate, and that works for your family, great.  But please keep in mind--because you are talking to a majorly sleep deprived mama here--that not all sleep solutions work for all families.  Some things I CANNOT AND WILL NOT DO:

1. Wear my baby to sleep.
2. Let him suck on me all night long.
3. Let my kid scream himself to sleep.

That said, my major parenting/sleep philosophy has been, since LG was tiny:  healthy kids and healthy families require sleep; do what you need to do to get sleep.  This has meant, among other things, putting LG to bed at 6:30 pm and skipping school functions.  Co-sleeping until both parties involved weren't benefiting anymore.  Walking Tiny Boy in the stroller for the entirety of a nap.  Sitting with him in the rocking chair at 4:00 am.  Keeping myself in bed with him for 2 hours if that gets him a reasonable nap.

But I am at my wits' end with Tiny Boy right now.  And, honestly, I think Tiny Boy is tired (all puns intended) of his own behavior right now, as he is crying the desperate wail of the overtired baby.  All my tricks--the rocking, the nursing, the walking, the pacifier--aren't working right now.  Every night, we go through this stupid ritual during which he nurses, falls asleep, wakes up, screams his head off and thrashes around, at which point I put him in the peapod (aka the woombie) so he doesn't punch me, and jiggle him until he calms down enough to rock to sleep.  And then he's awake 20-40 minutes later and we do the whole fucking thing over again.  (Yes, he often pulls the same shit at naptime with his babysitter.)

Last night I actually let him cry in the middle of the night (maybe for 10 minutes).  What that accomplished, apparently, was making him appreciate the breast I then popped in his mouth and then was in a deep enough sleep that I could dump him on the bed far enough away that we weren't touching and not hear from him again for 1.5 hrs.  Which is pretty much a Tiny Boy record these days.

Right now, he's fallen back to sleep (you know, after nursing at 3:00 and 4:00 and 5:00 and having a diaper) swaddled and I've got the air conditioner on and the fan blowing on high which creates an obscene amount of noise but seems to be helping, at least insofar as when he pulled the screaming in the peapod routine, he didn't wake up LG down the hall.

I'm operating on, I think, a grand total of 8 hrs of very fragmented sleep across the past two days, and I am contemplating leaving him with my mother and a major stash of milk this weekend and checking myself into a hotel with my post-transfer-freakout valium.  I don't think I'll actually do it, but it is tempting.

This is temporary, I know.  He will outgrow it, I know.  But if I could get him to sleep for even 2 consecutive hours at any point in the day I think I would be in heaven.

Update at 10:28 am:  I am writing at the kitchen table so MMH can re-rock Tiny Boy, who woke, predictably, 20 minutes into his nap.  Is it possible to have a sleep study done on an infant?  Because I think there's more here than an inability to self-soothe.  I actually wonder if his cortisol levels are permanently fucked from IUGR and prenatal steroids.