My baby is now 2 months 16 days old now, and we have a pretty good routine / schedule down that works most of the time. Per our pediatrician's suggestion, we put him down at around 6:30-7, and he would sleep through the night until the next morning around 6-7, waking up once at around 4am to feed. Recently he had one night he even skipped his 4am feed.

My problem is, no matter if it is a nap or sleep, he HAS TO cry. There is no other way. Say if it were a nap, when I see him rubbing his eyes, I put him down in his bouncy seat and tug him in and tell him let's take a short nap... then next thing you know he cries and screams and I have to shush him in his ear. He falls asleep pretty quickly though, maybe within 5 minutes.

At bedtime it is more difficult. Again he would cry out loud, we turn on the white noise and the overhead mobile. Sometimes he would pass out for 30 minutes, wake up and cry again. This time he would cry for maybe 15-30 minutes, sometimes even more. Per everyone's suggestion we didn't want to pick him up and sooth him, so usually we bend down to shush in his ear, or patt him...etc., but soothing him like that doesn't really work anymore, and the white noise machine starts to fail us either. He just would cry nonstop and at one point we would have to leave him and let him cry himself to sleep.

Another thing is we try not to use the pacifier... we didn't want to make it a habit for him to suck to sleep and has to reverse that in the future... and I don't want to create orthodontic problem for him.

Is this just a phase? What did we do wrong? Any suggestion? Somehow I feel that he takes that crying is a prelude to dreamland. I really want to help him but I do not know what else I can do.