I have been struggling with getting my daughter to sleep for several months. She slept great, waking up only once or twice a night, from about three months to six months. Then, at around six months, getting her to go to sleep became an issue.

Nursing her wasn’t enough. Not only did I nurse her until my breasts couldn’t take it anymore, but on top of that, sometimes she would push me away and begin crying.

Bouncing her on my knee pacified her, until my arms got tired.

We had a routine going- the baby noise that was supposed to simulate the sound of the womb, the dim light, story time, but it wasn’t working. I felt desperate. I became too emotionally involved and my husband would intervene when I let out a shrill. That was when I was at the end of my rope.

There is almost nothing worse than a crying infant that can’t go to sleep late at night. Torture at Guantanamo? They should make them listen to crying babies.

When my daughter finally fell asleep in my arms, she would wake up more than half the time when I transitioned her to her crib, and if she didn’t she would wake up within 20 minutes.

“Lose the transition,” my pediatrician said.

Her kid, she said, falls asleep by her side and she is able to do things- watch movies, work on her laptop- while her child sleeps beside her.

So I tried moving her to our family bed. I nursed her, and then when she fell asleep, moved her beside me on the big bed.

That worked better, except that I had no room on the bed for me. Our king size bed is actually made up of two extra long twins paired side by side. My husband takes up his entire side, and being 5’10”, I need my side too. Unfortunately, the little one, even though she is little, takes up the longitude of my mattress, and it only gets worse as I move away from her to have some space, and her head moves closer to me during the night, until she is a 45 degree angle on my bed, leaving me a sliver of space to rest on… sideways.

She still woke up crying at night, disturbing my husband, who has sleep issues as it is. I needed to move, and so we did- to the living room.

Every night, one of us rolls out the mattress that sits on top of our daughter’s crib. That way, we all have more room, and it worked better during the night in terms of nursing. But it didn’t solve the problem of how to get our daughter to sleep in the first place.

I still had the same troubles trying to get her to fall asleep at a decent hour, or any hour for that matter. At nine months, I tried extinction, aka the Ferber method. I let her cry for 20 minutes. It was agonizing not only for me, but for my neighbors. For the first time, I heard them banging on our mutual wall. Our experiment was over. We returned to what we normally do- let her stay up with us until she is so tired her brain gives way to sleep.

What happened the day after we tried the extinction method, however, scared the daylights out of me. Our little antelope had a hoarse voice, and it didn’t go away for several days. I thought she might have damaged her vocal chords permanently.

“Dear God,” I prayed. “Don’t let my stupidity ruin her voice.”

God was merciful. By the fifth day, her voice began returning to normal, as I remembered it. I vowed never to follow the Ferber method again.

I returned to doing the same things to help her go to sleep- holding, singing, humming, reading, nursing, playing the white noise- and expecting a different result. Finally, about a week ago, I came up with a novel solution. At least novel for me, because I haven’t heard or read anyone talk or write about it.

I don’t know why anybody hadn’t thought of this before, or if someone has, why it’s not more talked about.

During one of the nights I was exhausted from the day and not able to sleep because of my daughter, I suddenly remembered a sow I once observed a sow nursing her piglets. All the piglets were resting except one, who was fidgeting, and the sow, perhaps in exhaustion, raised her head to look at him, snorted at the piglet and then dropped her head back down. I think she pretended to be asleep because her closed eyes still twitched.

I decided to try that. Instead of snorting, I firmly told my daughter that it’s nighttime and “I’m going to sleep.” Then I lay down on the mattress and pretended to go to sleep. When my daughter wanted to nurse, I provided the goods, but my eyes remained closed.

In pretending to go to sleep, I actually did fall asleep. But when I woke up an hour or so later, my daughter was asleep, with no crying! Tonight, when I used the same technique again, I could feel my daughter pushing at me and using me as leverage to stand. When I peeked through my eyelashes, I saw her shifting about like an orangatangue, but I also saw her put her head down, buttocks up. She did this a couple times, and then, she fell asleep.

Her sleep time is still late (tonight it was 10:30), but she gets about 10 hours each night. My next task is to see if I can get her to bed earlier, so my husband and I can watch a movie or I can work on this blog, for instance.

This is a work in progress. But I am so glad she is asleep. Unless you’ve gone through it, you can only imagine how exhausting it is to be with your kid all day, and have that extra umph! to give to your child at night when they are being fussy. We need our child to go to sleep so that we can recover and be sane for the next day.

Originally written June 11, 2013.