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@knittylady: we sleep trained at 3.5 months, so a little earlier than you're asking. but anyway, we used the Ferber method but with our own set times ( I think 7 min, 10, 12, 15 or something like that). It went well! As background, LO did pretty well as a newborn when I nursed pretty much to sleep. But around 3 months, that stopped working and we soon found ourselves spending upwards of an hour or two going in and out of his room, trying to get him to fall asleep. The goal had been to sleep train at 4 months. But one night, at 3.5 months, as we were doing this in-and-out thing, we looked at each other and said well, we might as well start now because nothing else is working! So that's what happened.
I was one of those that thought my LO was going to scream for hours and hours. He cried (albeit, hard) for 40 minutes the first night. It was really hard. The subsequent nights were not difficult. He's now 7.5 months and for the most part things have been really great at night. Naps have gotten better overall too but still a challenge sometimes (like today,.....omg).

When people talk about sleep training, do they mean sttn or teaching baby to fall sleep on their own? I need help with both!

@knittylady: we just started last night using a modified Ferber. My DS will be four months tomorrow, but has pretty clearly been going through the 4m sleep regression for the past 2-3 weeks. Everyone in our house needs more sleep! The other approach we considered is the Baby Whisperer, but DS gets easily overstimulated so we thought the whole PU/PD approach wasn't the best idea.

We aren't trying to get DS to STTN or drop night feedings, just trying to get him to fall asleep more on his own and reduce the number of night wakings to something more reasonable than the 5+ we have been dealing with for the past 2+ weeks. It's too early to say how it's going (and I don't want to jinx anything), but just wanted you to know you aren't alone! We had planned to wait a few more weeks, but the MOTN wake ups were becoming unsustainable and making everyone cranky during the day.

@BabyTsMom: how did you swaddle wean? I'm trying to swaddle wean also and started with leaving the non dominant arm out. I only do it for the later naps in the day. I don't know if it's helping. How long did it take you to swaddle wean?

When you sleep trained to fall asleep, did you just put him in the crib and walk away?

@knittylady: it went wayyy better than I expected! We still had a lot of wake ups, but pretty minimal crying. My husband did the checks (we did a modified Ferber with 1/3/5 intervals) and the longest crying interval was 10-15 minutes, earlier in the night. For most of the wake ups, he got himself back to sleep before the first check or shortly thereafter. The most encouraging thing was the two MOTN feedings that were only 10-15 minutes long (typically he is a big time comfort nurser and MOTN feedings usually take forever) and he went back down very easily.

We haven't swaddled consistently for a few weeks now - he's been in the Merlin suit for about a month, but that wasn't really working much anyway, so we just put him in a sleep sack last night. He's getting to be pretty good about thumb sucking/soothing with a lovey, so we thought having his arms free to do that would be a net gain even with the startle factor. (He won't take a pacifier.)

Hope it helps! I will say that our LO 1) was already showing some signs of being able to self-soothe (on a long car trip last week where we couldn't rock him or nurse him every time he woke up, he started sucking his thumb and holding his lovey), 2) is definitely a tension releaser, so his crying doesn't typiclaly escalate, and 3) was starting to not be soothed by the swaddle/Merlin suit, rocking, so we figured taking those things away wouldn't make much of a difference. We had his 4-month check up today and our ped said she completely agrees with our decision to start now.

Obviously I am no expert and I think we still have some long nights ahead, but hope this helps you in some way! If nothing else, at least we are in the same boat

@Pumpkin Pie: it took three days. just the first night was hard (40min). the second and third days were shorter and we didn't have to do our checks at all. I think we got lucky with the timing and his own readiness.