Recently while at a play-date with a fellow mom, who happens
to be a therapist, I mentioned my child’s sleep habits. Let me give you the
rundown. We are less than two months away from my son’s second birthday and he
currently sleeps in our bed. If you can name a bad sleep habit, we’re probably
doing it. One of us has to stay with him until he falls asleep (whoever it is
will usually pass out with him and therefore we don’t often get our evenings
together). When he wakes up later in the evening, I usually just make it bed
time for myself to save the hassle of coming and going. He then demands, “boob”
(my toddler, not my husband!) and if I gently say no, he has a total melt down.
So I spend the majority of the rest of the night nursing him; that is when he’s
not flipping around the bed wrestling the blankets, resting his feet on my face
or smacking his dad on the nose as he tosses and turns. When he wakes up in the
morning and slides out of bed grabbing my hand yelling “Mama hand, maammaa
hand,” we all get up, usually with the husband and I feeling bleary eyed and (I
can’t lie) sometimes a touch resentful.
After giving this run down to my friend, she looked at me;
her eyes filled with genuine sympathy and said, “So you haven’t had a full
night’s sleep in almost two years. How have you not had a break down?”
Well, I’ve come close. I know our sleep situation is less
than ideal, and I’ve reluctantly accepted it because quite frankly, I don’t
have the energy not to. It was only hearing someone else point it out so clearly
that it hit me; I really haven’t had a good full night of sleep in almost two
years! (Apart from maybe a couple of times when a miracle occurred and my boy
slept through, and even on those nights I would go rushing into his room to
make sure he was still breathing because he couldn’t possibly have been
sleeping all that time). Let me tell you, none of this was in my parenting game
plan. Before I had a baby, I decided I was going to have a good sleeper. I
wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense! My child would be in bed at 7pm every
night and sleep like an angel.
Even after I had my baby, I was judgmental of parents who
had bad sleepers. They probably indulged their children, I thought. One friend
of mine has a six-year-old daughter who didn’t sleep through the night until
she was three years old. I was horrified when she shared that information with
me while I nursed my newborn. Even though I tried to look sympathetic and nod
with understanding all I could think was, “there’s no way I’m going to allow
that in my house!”
On another occasion I was taking a walk with my two month
old and bumped into an acquaintance with a nine month old who told me his baby
was still waking three to four times a night. Again I smiled to cover up my
horror. My son would surely be sleeping through the night at nine months old!
You see, early on I was lulled into a false sense of
security when my three month old would only wake maybe once or twice a night to
nurse briefly and then go back to sleep for a few hours. I was smug when I
talked to people about how my baby went to bed so easily and would do six or
seven hour stretches of sleep. I patted myself on the back, congratulating
myself on such a smooth transition into motherhood. I was doing so well. If my
new mothering skills could be graded on how well my newborn slept, I would
surely get an A+. Well, I learned my lesson (actually I learned many lessons)
in the coming months, the first being that my child’s sleep habits were not the
product of anything I was doing, the second was that smugness will return and
bite you in the ass! Shortly after mentally praising myself for my wonderful
little sleeper, something called the “four month sleep regression” happened
(seriously, it’s real. Google it! In fact, Google any month of sleep regression
and I bet you can find something from Dr. Google to back it up). To make a long
story short, 18 months later we still haven’t recovered. It seemed to get
really unbearable around the 10-month mark, when my child would wake up every
hour throughout the night. I remember many a morning I begged my husband not
to go to work and leave me with “that
baby.” I would lie on my living room floor and sob. One morning I even told my
husband, “I’m so tired I want to jump out of the window and die. At least if I
was dead I’d be resting!” At play dates I bored even myself with my laments to
fellow moms about my son’s terrible sleep. And naptime was no better. He would
only nap for half an hour at a time and sometimes that was after an hour of
rocking him to sleep.
I asked my pediatrician about my boy’s sleep. She told me in
no uncertain terms that I had gotten him into bad habits by comforting him at
night and that I should put him to bed, close the door and not go in until
the next morning, even if he was screaming. I nodded enthusiastically at her
suggestions, knowing I was very unlikely to follow through on them. At any
following appointments, I lied and told the doctor he was sleeping pretty well.
I read
Weissbluth and resolved to let my son cry it out, then I read Sears and
promised myself I would never let him cry it out or in fact ever cry in
general. I also read Ferber, Mindell and Pantly, all offering differing
approaches to sleep. I felt so confused. Other parents seemed so sure about which approach to take. I searched through sleep posts on my birth board on
babycenter.com, I listened in on sleep seminars. I even considered saving up
for a sleep specialist to come and do a private consultation at our house, but
I’m afraid it would have been a waste of money because I’ve never found a plan I’ve
been able to consistently follow, so I’m pretty sure an expensive specialist
couldn’t help us. I have nothing against sleep training of any kind if it works
for you. I just can’t seem to make it work.
Now, when people ask me how my son is sleeping, I usually
tell them he’s sleeping pretty well (whatever that means). Half the time, I’m
so tired I barely remember if he woke up during the night. That’s one of the
beauties of having him in our bed. Naps have improved, but he only
takes a really good nap if I lie down with him (which most of the time I’m glad
to do because I’m so flippin tired!). If babies and toddlers have trouble
sleeping because their brains are so busy developing then I am mother to a pure
genius.
About 7 months ago, we went through a pretty good stage for
a short time. My son would let me put him in his crib wide-awake and he’d be
happy about it. He’d even wave goodnight to me. The first time it happened my
husband was incredulous as I walked into the living room so soon after leaving
to put the boy to bed. I’m sure he thought I had knocked the child out. It
continued for a week or two and our toddler was sleeping until 4 or 5 in the
morning, when I would bring him into our bed and he would sleep for another
couple of hours. I thought I had finally cracked the situation. Then the first
ear infection came, followed by another, and another until six ear infections
and one house move later, my son refused to sleep in his own bed. What could I
do? I asked myself. I couldn’t put my toddler to bed and leave him to cry,
knowing that he could be in pain. So he started sleeping in our bed full time.
We took him to an ENT and he had tubes put in his ears. I resolved to work on
the sleep situation after the tubes were in. It’s now been four weeks since the
surgery and I have yet to pluck up the courage to put my boy in his own bed.
Call me lazy, but I don’t have the fight in me at the end of the day to insist
he sleep in his own room. There are only so many battles that I
can take in one day - getting the boy dressed, changing his diapers, getting
him to eat his food instead of throwing it on the floor, convincing him he
needs to put shoes on to go outside, wrestling him into his stroller or car
seat, suggesting he be gentle with his friends, not bite the dog , that he have
a bath, or that the dark chocolate mommy is eating is really disgusting - are
just a few things that spring to mind.
My husband converted the crib into a toddler bed in a bid to
get the little guy to sleep there. It worked once. For one half of a
night. Now, we use the toddler bed for his little friend (who spends a couple
days a week at our house) to nap in. I’m glad to see it’s getting some use.
So here we are, stuck between a rock and a hard place. Sorry
to use a cliché but it’s the truth. I think the plan is to get him a full size
bed and gently transition him into it and hope we can get him to a place where
he’s happy to sleep all night in his own bed and wean him from the ‘boob’. I’m
skeptical to say the least, but I live in hope. In the meantime, I’ll just day
dream about a big fluffy bed all to myself, and 8, no make that 12 hours of
uninterrupted sleep. After all, if you’re gonna dream, why not dream big?! And hopefully my darling son will be
done nursing and sleeping in our bed before he goes off to college, or we’ll
really have a problem on our hands!
