reading "on becoming babywise"

this book deserves a post of it's own because it allowed us to guide baby to sleep through the night (6-7 hours) from even before she turned 2 months and steadily progress to sleeping 12 hours before hitting 3 months. i still remember the first time baby slept from 8+ until sunrise, and how i was on a "high" that day from all the sleep i got.
one doesn't appreciate uninterrupted night time sleep until after having to get up every 3 hours (or less) at night to tend to a crying baby. i would probably have degenerated into a mess if baby kept up with crazy night time waking hours past that first 1.5 months. i would also have found it really hard to decide to go back to work if baby still woke up at night. for that, i am eternally grateful to A and his wifey who got me the book very early on in my pregnancy and told me "MUST FOLLOW!". it was the best present they could have given us, and now i try to pay it forward by telling my friends about it. no, make that rave to my friends about it. also, i found out later from A that there was a 100% success rate among his friends who used the book. so, it really works. it is not about lucking out with an easy baby. we did our part, and now we are enjoying the fruits of our labour.
what struck me about this book was how it starts out not by discussing sleep techniques, but by saying "great marriages produce great parents" - how easy to forget that when a baby comes into our lives. at the end of the day, it is the togetherness and commitment of a baby's parents to one another that makes the baby feel secure. hence, parenting should not be child-centric but centre around integrating baby into the family, to be part of a "we" instead of just catering incessantly to baby.
the book then goes on to point out that parents should control/regulate baby's feeding times and make sure that baby takes full feeds during the feeding times, which in turn will regulate their metabolism and later their sleep/wake cycles. it is not what (viz. breast milk or formula), but when baby eats that is important. also, after the initial feed-on-demand phase, it should be the parents and not baby who determines the feeding schedule (what the book calls parent-directed feeding).
for us, bottle feeding baby with pumped breastmilk for most of the time from quite early on actually helped us to put baby on a regular feeding schedule easily ... it would have been so much more difficult to know if baby had eaten enough if she was latched on.
for me, i found the advice of letting baby settle into sleep on her own the hardest to stick to at first, and even now i can't do it for baby's naps. but at night, we do put her into bed awake if she hasn't already fallen asleep after her feed. and i can say that baby is able to fall asleep on her own, and quite quickly too! a few kicks, a few rounds of rolling about and then suddenly she falls still and she's gone for the night.
i never really thought much about sleep training before baby was born, but now i know that having a baby doesn't have to mean sleep deprivation. it has also showed me that our babies are more capable of handling life/sleeping alone/sleeping for a long stretch than what we give them credit for.