I am a second-time mother whose firstborn did not sleep through the night. While my son is four now and sleeps soundly in his own room, my husband and I have come a long, tiring way. It was a difficult road training him to first, stop breastfeeding at two years old, and secondly, sleep in his own bed through the night.

When we found out we were expecting our second, our heads were swimming with the horrors of past experiences. We planned to raise the second one differently.

I wanted the baby to sleep in his own crib from birth so I would wake up, feed him while sitting down, burp him and put him back to bed. I also planned to wean him much earlier than the first. I imagined myself mastering one of the sleep training methods, while constantly reminding myself that it was hard during the process, but our lives would be much easier for it afterwards.

Here I am with an eight-month-old, who breastfeeds to sleep and sleeps smack centre between my husband and I as he wakes up several times a night to breastfeed. The crib? Oh, I change the sheets regularly because it gathers dust. Ideally, I would have continued down this pattern until I went home in July and had help weaning my baby off the breast, and I hope that the sleep training will also fall into place.

However, I am faced with an emergency situation that will force me to be away from my baby for at least three days. To make life easier for my husband, I begrudgingly went down the sleep training route. I started leaving my son in the crib to fall asleep by himself — and failed marvellously.

I just don’t know how to attack the issue, even though I surrounded myself with literature and content of all kinds on the subject. I find myself stymied on where to start. Do I start by weaning or sleep training the child? If it is sleep training first, which method do I pick? My critical mind always imagined Ferber to be the simplest shortest route to sleep training a child.

For those who don’t know, the Ferber method is a sleep training technique that teaches babies to self-soothe. You leave them in the crib and walk out, only waiting for increased periods before entering the room to soothe the baby without picking them up. This method has failed with both my children as they cry even louder when I walk in and walk out again.

There is also the Cry it out method, which is a ‘technique’ of allowing babies to fall asleep by themselves without intervening, essentially allowing the babies to cry until they fall asleep. A highly controversial method that many believe conditions the baby to understand that comfort is not coming no matter how hard they cry. So no, I do not plan on doing this.

Another sleep training method that has caught my attention is the Gentle sleep training method. It focuses on gradually teaching babies to fall asleep independently with minimal distress. The parent starts by facing the baby in the crib using a chair, then gradually moving the chair further away or picking up the baby to soothe him and putting him down again.

I might embark on the journey using this method, yet I remain skeptical because the one thing I understand as a parent is: Children work on their own time.