sleep: the final cut?

Jalen's finally got it. He's had it for about a month now. He understands the great pleasure of sleeping through the night. He hasn't perfected it yet, but he's pretty close. Maybe three nights out of a week, he'll wake up looking for his pacifier. He's still very partial to napping during the day with his pacifier, so it's amazing that he does not require it for his nighttime slumber. But something will wake him up in the wee hours now and then, and he'll look for it. This amounts to about a three-minute disruption during his sleep (and mine). Otherwise, on average, it's eleven hours straight. We tried the cry-it-out thing for a couple of weeks at about 4.5 months old, but it didn't work all that well so we kind of scratched it. Then the unlucky task of tending to his numerous night wakings somehow befell mainly upon me. Eventually the task became solely mine when Jalen went through a phase of bedtime separation anxiety with his mother. They say not to exceed the six-month mark when training your baby to sleep through the night because it gets exponentially harder. For that reason, we were feeling pretty screwed when Jalen passed the nine-month mark. Still, we had no choice but to try to let him cry it out again. Well, there was one night of crying for 1.5 hours, then two more nights of under an hour and he somehow figured it out. I definitely noticed the difference in his crying this time around because it was more of a whining, angry, brat type of cry as opposed to a dying Godzilla type of cry. Now that we've entered a friendlier sleeping pattern, I've kind of forgotten the old days. I guess ten months of two to four twenty-minute wakings was not all that bad?