Anyone mining search engine data over the past few weeks might have noticed a sudden uptick in searches conducted between the hours of 3 and 5 a.m. Eastern time. Some sample search strings:

baby awake for several hours every night

how to get baby back to sleep

frequent night waking

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Minor’s latest sleep problem was waking up multiple times each night (n), but only allowing himself to be put back to sleep n - 1 times. Usually it was 4:00 a.m. when he dug in his little fat heels, but sometime he would change it up and refuse to go back to sleep at 11:00, or 2:00, or 5:00. Whatever the magic number was, if we did anything other than put him in the car and drive to Dunkin’ Donuts to await opening time, he would fuss, cry, and scream. For two hours. “Anything” includes rocking, bottles with formula, bottles with water, pacifier, music, leaving him alone in the crib, and …. oh, yeah…co-sleeping. Just in case you were going to suggest it.

Google did. My searches returned an awful lot of attachment parenting advice and more than a few admonishments to “pick up the baby–you can’t spoil a baby by holding him!” which never fails to enrage me. Do you think I’m not picking him up at night because I’m AFRAID OF SPOILING HIM?! Picking up a baby is not spoiling him; however, driving him to Dunkin’ Donuts at 4:00 a.m. is.

Getting no relief from the internets, I canvassed a few bricks-and-mortar people for their experiences. Most of them advocated the cry-it-out method. Since we already were sort of letting him cry it out, with regular check-ups, I was looking for something new. Then one of my colleagues with a daughter the same age as Minor said, “We have a rule when our daughter wakes up not to go in for fifteen minutes. Usually she puts herself back to sleep before then.”

That made me think. Fifteen minutes? Husband and I weren’t the kind of tyros who rushed in whenever the kid whimpered, but once he got up to a full head of scream, we always went in immediately, on the theory that he couldn’t go from 60 to 0 without intervention. But like George Costanza, I was ready to do the opposite of everything I had ever done.

So we instituted the fifteen-minute rule, and for a blessed week it worked. At the first 11:00 wake-up, Minor started screaming at minute 2 and lost interest completely by minute 7. At the 4:00 a.m. call, same thing. It looks like all our efforts to console him were just intefering with his ability to fall asleep on his own.

For a week, it was pure bliss. Then Minor started waking up with a full diaper in the middle of the night. This week’s searches:

how frequently should babies poop

normal infant bowel movement

who poops in the middle of the night for f*** sake

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