self-soothing FTW. Although, funny story: sleep training went great with our first kid - maybe one hour of "cry it out" and then everything was fine for the rest of the night and all following nights. So when the second one came along, and we had managed to forget everything about the care of newborns because we formed few permanent memories during the haze of sleep deprivation, we thought to let him cry it out _on the very first night home_. Literally a 3 day old baby. Fortunately when we came fully awake we stopped mumbling "cry it out" to each other and remembered, right, newborns need food in the middle of the night. For months. "Cry it out" has to wait a bit...
It does, but you can still establish “this is night” and feed the baby in a very low-stimulus (dark, no talking, keep them swaddled, etc.) environment for those night feeds. That “dream-feed” is basically just eating, checking the diaper and putting them back down for the next 4 hours. Obviously if they cry for more than 15 minutes or so you go check on them (e.g. make sure the diaper is still dry), but by keeping the intervention to a bare minimum you keep them in a state of more or less teaching themselves to do the actual sleeping part :)
Oops, I meant "Cry it out" *had* to wait a bit. He's nine now =)
Sadly his night feeds went somewhat long because he was a reluctant burper, and that big burp was definitely necessary for him to fall back asleep. I read most of "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" during those night feeds (on a very-low-light-setting kindle, in a dark room, etc). There are probably more conducive environments for reading that book...
