Hellobee Boards

Ugh. I would write a polite but firm letter to the neighbors apologizing for the inconvenience and explaining you are in the process of sleep training your baby which will lead to quieter times eventually but that they are going to have to help them by not banging on the baby's wall scaring him. Explain it usually takes a week and what his approximate nap times and bed times so they can try to avoid being home at those times if possible. You can also temporarily put some egg crate foam or some kind of sound absorbing foam against the wall to mitigate the noise and let the neighbor's know you are doing that to try and minimize their discomfort. Also suggest running a humidifier or white noise machine on their end to drown out some of the noise.

@Raspberry: we are having a hard time sleep training now at 9 months. We tried no cry solutions, but he just wants to stand up and pull himself along the crib. It's super hard, and I'm sure it's harder if you are worrier about your neighbours. I'd leave a polite note, as well. My experience has been that the sound machine/humidifier only helps to sooth LO back to sleep when he wakes up. It does nothing to block out any noise for other dwelling occupants. We can hear his cries over it = heartbreaking!

@GingerBeBe: Gotcha! Good idea. We'll have to try that.

We had to re-sleep train at 15 months and it was HARD! Took a full week (with the first three nights the worst) but we've had two full months of great sleep since, so it was very worth it. Hang in there!

We live in a city apartment with neighbors above, below and beside us. Being self-conscious about the noise made sleep training extra excruciating. After the first night we felt awful and left a bottle of wine, a box of nice earplugs and a note for each of our neighbors. It has gone a long way toward neighborly relations.

Even though your neighbors were complete jerks it might be worth the earplug/bottle of booze peace offering if that will ease your anxiety. It is bad enough to endure your baby's cries - it is doubly hard worrying about several other people losing sleep over your baby's crying (at the point we re-sleep trained our LO was waking 3-4 times all night long so our baby was screaming for up to an hour at 12am, 2am and 4am--it SUCKED for everyone involved).