This is very long, but I'm still all upset. Hope you'll bear with me.
DS is 20mths. We did cc at 4mths because he was getting hooked on the breast and wouldn't go to sleep w/o it, waking every hour or so to demand more. He slept through after the cc, but in the last few months he had a succession of colds and would wake with a streaming nose, coughing fits, etc. I always went to him quite fast, feeling that it was justified in the circustances as he was poorly. Anyway, in the last fortnight or so he'd been unwilling to go to sleep alone, crying "Mummy, Mummy, cuddle, cuddle" about 10mins after I put him down. I'd go in, stroke his back, wipe his nose if necessary, pick him up and put him down sometimes, but he'd been crying for longer and longer stretches. Then on Friday we went to friends' for dinner and he didn't conk out as planned but stayed buzzing till 11pm and then slept in till 11am the next day, which threw his cycle a bit too, understandably. (Won't be trying that again.)Tonight DH said he'd deal with things and left DS to cry and shout the heartrending cuddle call for 5, then 10, then 15, then 20 mins, while I cried on the sofa . I was really shaken and also a bit concerned, as when DS cries that hard and long he gets very sweaty and I don't like him going to sleep in damp pyjamas...After the 20 minute stretch, DH went in and I didn't hear anything for ages, so I assumed DS had keeled over with exhaustion and DH had gone off to read or work in another room. I've just been upstairs, over an hour later, and DH is the one who'd keeled over: he's lying on the sofabed in DS's room, sleeping like a log, while DS is slumbering just as soundly in his cot! Not very in keeping with the cc ethos, surely, to stay and sleep in the room after being so unrelenting beforehand.
The point of this long ramble is that the whole cc rigmarole really distresses me: I put up with it when DS was a baby because the nights were so awful that I thought we'd divorce or go mad or something. But now if I go and see DS once or twice after putting him down, he goes off and sleeps through, though he sometimes cries around 3am, which I think is linked to the colds. I just feel that leaving him to cry is against every instinct I have, and the calling out really gets to me. He's still so young and is learning to talk (in 2 languages), so I can see that his mind is racing a lot of the time and he finds it hard to unwind at the end of the day. Part of my distress is linked to guilt, I know, as I hate going to work and leaving him, and he clearly finds it hard too, according to DH, who's currently looking after him most days. I feel that's tough enough on DS without adding night training (a concept I'm not wholly at ease with anyway) to boot. The fact that DH stayed long enough in the room to fall asleep on the sofabed suggests that he isn't as sure about the process as he claims to be, either.
So, does anyone who's been kind enough to read this far have any advice? If I go to DS once or twice in the evening/early morning, am I just storing up trouble for the future? Should I grit my teeth for a week or so and go through the cc torture? Should I wait till I'm absolutely sure he's fully over his colds? In short, should I be cruel to be kind, or just kind?? I know we need to decide rather than faffing around being all strict one evening and more flexible the next, but I'm really torn. Any advice would be very, very welcome. Thanks in advance.