Crying it out is a waste of time. But not in the way you might think.

With both of my girls, I was a “Babywise” mom (which basically is a philosophy of keeping your baby on a rolling 3 hour schedule of feeding, playing, and sleeping). In Babywise, the author (who a lot of people hate) talks about allowing the baby to cry before falling asleep but checking on them throughout to make sure they’re okay. I took the Babywise approach with A and let her cry it out (CIO) many times. I had a change of heart with E – not because I didn’t think it worked; A slept and still sleeps like a champion. E does, too. But see, as a first time mom having no experience under my belt, I was afraid that I would “spoil” my baby and that she would never sleep on her own if she couldn’t “self-soothe” so I did what the book told me (to an extent). With E, having been more experienced, I adopted the 3 hour schedule but with some small tweaks, including removing CIO (which kind of happened unintentionally, actually). But, this isn’t about the effectiveness of CIO or the studies that go with it. I’m not here to start a debate or mommy wars. This is about what I learned as a mom my second time around.

What I learned is that CIO is a waste of time: A waste of precious baby time.

I often get asked, “How do you do it all?” or something similar, and I also often hear that I appear to have such balance. Well, I must make it look really easy because 1. I don’t do it all and 2. I have zero balance. Some one actually used the word “glamour” recently and as sweet as the comment was, I laughed out loud. That said, I thought it might be a good idea to share what a typical workday looks like for me lately.