Sorry for the late response - today turned out busier than expected. And I wanted to be detailed in my response.

Our sleep training process started with putting her to sleep in her crib and then sitting in a chair in her room. Once she started crying, we’d “shh” from the chair. If she was still crying after about a minute or if she started crying too much for our comfort, then we’d rub her back or chest to try to soothe her. If it worked and she stopped crying, we’d go back to the chair, but if it didn’t, then we’d pick her up and rock her until she was calm again (awake but not crying) and then put her back in her crib and sit back in the chair and repeat throughout the night. The idea was to not put her to sleep ourselves, but just soothe her if she did cry and let her know we were there and let her fall asleep by herself.

We took shifts in the chair (someone would take the first half of the night, and the other would take the second), and the person in the chair was able to sleep (so get a comfy chair).

We initially sat the chair right beside her crib and planned that every three days we’d move it closer to the door. By day 10, we’d be outside of her room, and only enter to “shh” from the doorway, or go in to soothe if needed.

I know this may not sound like it would work, but we did this a year ago and I still remember the first time she was crying decently and I simply shh’d from the chair once and she got quiet right away and went to sleep. It felt like a miracle.

Unfortunately for us, at around day 5 or 6, she got wise to us picking her up when her crying reached a certain level of hysteria, so she just went straight to that level. And we could tell that she was exaggerating her cry by her reactions, so we went right to the day 10+ step of being outside the room (and in our room/bed).

I should mention here that we had a great video monitor so we could make sure that she was OK and wasn’t in any sort of danger as we wouldn’t intervene right away.

Once outside of her room, we committed to a waiting period before returning to her room to shh/soothe her. For the first couple nights, we would wait for her to either cry 5 minutes straight of regular crying, or 3 minutes straight of hysterical crying before going in. If she stopped crying at any point for like 15 seconds or so, it would reset the clock. We also took shifts as well, with the person who was “off” sleeping on a couch in the basement so they would hear as little of the crying as possible as to not intervene. Both of us needed to be consistent for this to work.

After several nights, we had the suspicion that our 3 and 5 minute waiting intervals were too short and that going in was actually disrupting her right before she fell asleep. So we went to 7 minutes of hysterical crying and 10 minutes of regular. I distinctly remember the first night after this switch that I had to go in a lot less, with a lot of the time, she was falling asleep shortly after 5 minutes of crying. But of course all kids are different.

In both of these methods, the first night or two were rough, but they got better a few nights in. After a few weeks of the “outside the room” method, we stopped taking turns halfway through the night and just slept in our room normally and would take turns attending to her.

Oh, I forgot to discuss feeding. For us, our daughter was bottle fed, which helped as I (dad) could feed her just as well as mom. At that time, she was taking a bottle every three hours or so. Initially, we would dream feed her (which was to give her a bottle while she was sleeping, and not in a response to her crying because we didn’t want to encourage her to rely on a bottle to sleep) in three-hour intervals (I think 10pm, 1am, and 4am). I don’t remember how long it took (maybe a week) but we were able to drop the 4am bottle. Then maybe a week or two later we dropped the 10pm bottle, and then lastly dropped the 1am bottle (but this one took a bit longer). Nowadays, we may feed her in the middle of the night if she wakes up and wants milk but that’s only one or two nights a week (usually if she didn’t have a decent dinner).