Getting my beans to sleep ALL night

It's a little after 7am and yes I decided to talk about sleep. Maybe because I wish I was sound asleep in my bed still. But mama duty called shortly after six. I got K ready and off to school, and now I'm sitting here and decided..hmm I am going to whip out how i feel about sleep {in children that is}

I decided on this subject because I feel its very controversial. People have so many different views and, lots of the time people aren't really on the same page about it. Luckily my husband and I are. So it was pretty easy to get a routine down after deciding what was really for us.

I am 100% for the cry it out method. If they need something else by all means give it them. But, I see nothing wrong with letting a child cry once in awhile. I use certain rules/guidelines for this. Before you put your child down for bed make sure that #1 they are changed #1 they are fed #3 they are SAFE. I've been noticing more and more that people get really touchy about this subject, another reason I decided to whip it out first.
When you put your child down especially for the first how ever many times, they will cry. This is going to make you feel probably pretty sad. Because they do want you. But my big thing is independence. I myself, want my children to learn to do things by their selves. During life they are going to have lots of things come at them from birth on. I want them to be ready and able to tackle these things on their own. It by all means does not mean I am or will not be there for them. Because I will be, I am their biggest fan. With our youngest child we started the crying out method between 4-5 months. At that time I was still breastfeeding so if she cried to long I would feed her and put her back into bed. Sometimes she would wake up but I would try to leave her and follow my three rules and go over them in my head. I read up on this method before doing it and I would check on her (without her seeing me) every so often. I also want to note that we were lucky and the longest we really to endure the crying was an hour. Some people have to wait longer, which I'm sure makes it even harder. My child was sad which made me feel sad but, she was okay and would eventually fall asleep. And she did eventually fall asleep..every single time. Some nights were rough, others seemed far too easy. Another thing we did when we first started this was go in the living room and turn the tv on so we had other noise and werent 100% focused on the crying. We needed a distraction, not to ignore her but so we didnt cave in. And it really did help! Shes 16 months old now and some nights she still cries. It's rare, usually she just kinda whines and in less than 5 minutes we do not hear a peep. Last night was one of those nights where she cried and my husband and I sat on the couch glancing up at each other wondering if we were going to have to make a trip in there. She stopped in less than 15 minutes, probably closer to 10. The crying it out method was extremely tough to do at first. We felt bad hearing her sad, knowing if we just rocked her or something she would pass out. But, I really wanted her to be able to sooth herself to sleep and be able to do the same if she woke up in the night just like us adults and my other children do. It might of been difficult to do at first but, I'm thankful for the full uninterrupted sleep I have been getting ever since. Trust me, you can get a full nights sleep with children. It's possible, forget what everyone else says ;) Some may question this and say there is no way they could do this to their child, which is fine. But, I do have three children, one who is almost almost six and I did the same thing to her and my son and it worked for them as well. So I have been sleeping pretty dang good my last ALMOST 6 years of motherhood. And once baby #4 is on the way, I plan to do the same thing.