Wah Wah pedal from hell

It's been a tough few weeks for Cat and I.Aimee has been waking up every two hours during the night and we both have been walking around like zombies as a result.Part of the blame lies with me. Apparently I am a noisy sleeper, with my snores, grunts and turning around, it doesn;t take much and Aimee wakes up. So I have been relegated to the futon in the living room. I don;t mind if it means I and Cat get a little more sleep but no, Aimee still wakes up and cannot go back to sleep. So, in order to calm her, Cat feeds her. This was fine until the last week, when Aimee fed so much during the night, she showed no interest to feed during the day. Worse, she now associated her night feeds with sleep and could only sleep whilst on the breast.She would scream and fuss and whinge until she got her feed and then continue to fuss. Cat and I realised, that despite our best efforts at denying her the use of a dummy, she had the next best thing - Cat's nipple!
So last night, out of sheer desperation, we did something we thought we would never do - controlled crying. The nemesis of all parenting techniques. Basically, it means letting your baby cry until she realises she can;t have what she want and makes herself go to sleep. It is not for the faint hearted. Each five minutes or so, you go in to reassure her, but you do not pick her up. Some horror stories talk of 3hour stints of intense crying. Before, Cat and I could not bear to hear her cry for longer than five minutes. When it is your own, you are instinctively programmed to respond within seconds to your baby crying. Last night,we went for it, and after a good feed, Cat put her in the cot and left the room. Of course Aimee started fussing, which
turned to yelling, which turned to screaming, which turned into the final level - BANSHEE HELL CRY!!!! It is awful. But me and Cat looked at each other and vowed to keep a strong front - with her entering every five minutes to hush to her. We were almost at our wits end desperate to pick her up when, after fifteen minutes of heelish cries, she stopped, whimpered and then went silent. She was asleep. I couldn't believe it. Only fifteen minutes?? Surely we had been let off too easily. We sat in the kitchen, waiting for the next installment. But there was none, bar a couple of sleepy whimpers, which was normal.
We have to do this for until Aimee can fall asleep under her own steam without any aids (feeding, rocking, music etc). It can be done, the books lead us to beleive that it almost always works. But it takes resolves of steel. We are hopeful of it working in the average three days it takes most others. But it does warn that it could take seven.
But the benefits are plenty. Mainly, that both Aimee and us get a decent night's sleep. But also that she doesn't use the breastfeeding or anything else as a sleep aid, which could cause us
big problems later on. As a result, we hope that a good night, means a good day with less whingeing and fussing and more feeding.
Hopefully it will lead to a drop of night feeding altogether.
Fingers crossed and hands over the ears.xx

Grandpa Yang says something amusing to Aimee!