the littlest carscadden: 11 Months: Learning to sleep

We are currently sitting in our bedroom, down the hall from Miles' room, listening to him cry. Sleep training. It has gone better than I anticipated. Thinking of Miles as a persistent and stubborn boy, one who works hard to solve problems, no matter how silly (like pushing the recycling bin all the way across the kitchen), I thought for sure this boy would be crying for up to four hours the first night of training. But he cried only one hour. And his night wakings and naps have lasted 10 minutes or less, sometimes even less than a minute.
What is sleep training? We're really training Miles to learn to go to sleep by himself. Without rocking, shushing, bouncing, sucking or feeding. Since the day he was born he has never gone to sleep on his own. Not once. And in the last month or so, putting him to sleep has become an ordeal. It takes longer and longer to rock him to sleep. He would either fight to stay awake while we were rocking him or wake up crying as soon as his head hit the mattress. This was true for both naps and night time wakings. He would wake at night up to four or five times. I had originally thought it would be fine to bring him into our bed around 4 or 5am, especially since we coslept for the first seven months. But 4 or 5am turned into 3am and then 2am and more recently, 1am.
So we're using the Ferber method of sleep training, something I swore up and down before having a kid that I would never, ever do. We do a nighttime routine: bottle, bath, book. Then we kiss him, tell him goodnight, put him in his crib, and leave the room. At which point he starts crying. He cries on and off for a while, an hour the first night, 45 minutes the second night, 20 minutes tonight. And we check in on him at set intervals. The first night it was at 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes and then 15 minute intervals until he's asleep. Each night we lengthen the time before we check in on him. And each night he's gotten to sleep much faster and easier. When we check on him, we're not picking him up or making him stop crying. We're letting him know that we're around and didn't abandon him. We're in the room for less than a minute.
I didn't like this method before we had sleep problems because of all the crying. Some people imply that you can permanently damage a kid's psyche because you're abandoning them. You're breaking the trust cycle that he's built. He used to think he could cry and we would come. Now he cries, and no one comes. But the lack of sleep is weighing on me hard. The last few weeks have been brutal. Absolutely brutal. I feel like a zombie at work, grasping for words that slip away like sand between my fingers. I'm grumpy, short of patience and generally fatigued. I've gained weight and can't seem to pull myself out of bed to exercise before work. Basically, it's gotten real bad at the Kennedy/Carscadden residence.
And in the end, I don't think Miles is being damaged by this process. During daytime hours we respond swiftly to his every complaint. Even at night we respond to his cries, just on a set schedule. Ultimately, the little boy has to learn how to go to sleep and now seems like the right time. A doctor friend of mine at work says that she still drives her nearly four year old around in the car EVERY night to get her to sleep. That was a good dose of perspective just as we were embarking on this sleep training journey.
Here are the pictures and videos of our sleep master this week: