and here’s a link to a great message board about the “Pick Up Put Down” method of sleep training that the Baby Whisperer advocated. The general idea is that you are there to comfort your baby, but that s/he has to put him/her self to sleep. The FAQ in particular is very useful because there’s a post about what the method is and then a bunch of other info. I had read the book initially, but I think this message board is actually more helpful:

PUPD message board
You have to be a member to post stuff there, but not to read it. So I’d start by reading everything in the FAQ and go from there. The key is to make sure you can totally commit to it for a week so that you are consistent. And she advocated that one parent should take two days, and then the other parent take the next two days, etc. That means all of the wake ups. That may not be feasible in the day for naps, but it is helpful at night for one person to be handling ALL OF THE WAKING that night. And if the other person steps in, it sort of invalidates everything the other person is doing. It only took us about 3 days, really, so it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. And of course, if your baby is sick or something, all bets are off ; )

Some of the things we didn’t follow are forcing him to stay in bed until a certain time (he wakes between 5:30 and 6, period). Although, I do make him stay in bed until 5:30, but not later even though it would be nice for me. And he is almost a year old and I still dream feed him at 9:00 to help him through the night. We tried cutting it out, but he just can’t quite make it from 6:30 to 5:30. According to the Baby Whisperer stuff, Dream Feeds are usually cut much earlier, but you have to adapt to your own baby’s needs, right? Oh, and we still totally use a binky, but he can find it himself now.

Feel free to email or comment if you have other questions and I’d love to hear how it goes…