How do you feel about "cry it out" strategies?

Tristan has been very restless in his sleep lately. Some times he's dreaming and our ignoring him for a few minutes seems to work and he drifts back to sleep. Yes, he's still in his crib in our room so we can hear every whimper he makes. The same goes for him - he can hear every noise we make when we turn in bed or when Jean-Louis snores. We still haven't determined when to move him into his own room but it's not that simple. I think the layout of our house sucks for having a baby but all this is another blog post! So, back to restlessness...

It's not that hard to put Tristan to sleep, especially if we use the pacifier. Then, he would sleep 4-6 hours straight and I would feed him sometime between 3 and 5AM and he would sleep another good stretch for around 4 hours. This was the case a month and a half ago. Now, after his night feeding, he would wake up after about 2 hours and on and on it goes until I finally drag the both of us out of bed at around 7 or 8AM. The quickest way to put him back to sleep is to use the pacifier but then he would cry after 10 minutes because he has dropped it. Depending on how tired we are, some times we rock him and then put him back down so we don't have to use the pacifier. If we are lucky, he will sleep 1 hour straight after that. On very bad days, I put him in bed with me, on Jean-Louis' side, and I sleep on my side as far away as I can. Yeah, last night was a tiring one (yawn, yawn...). I feel like our day is totally messed up because of it.

Jean-Louis and I want to sleep through the night. I know that compared to other parents, we actually have it pretty easy. We both have a lot of things to do during the day on top of taking care of Tristan and we just can't afford to be tired all the time. Sleeping through the night will really help. We're thinking of slowly implementing the "no cry method" for sleep training that is described on babycenter. If that doesn't work in 2 months, we'll try the "cry it out" method. I hope it doesn't have to come to that. I have to say subjecting little Tristan to the cry it out method makes me feel unkind and guilty. Jean-Louis on the other hand, has little problem with it. He's a lot more harsh when it comes to discipline. I believe in discipline too but Tristan is only 3 months old. I think I whined about this in the last blog post.

We'll start sleep training on a Friday night (maybe in 2 weeks, when he is 4 months old) since we are bound to lose even more sleep from trying this. Maybe I'll have to start drinking coffee the following week. This weekend, I would like to try to cut down on his pacifier addiction.