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| Tuesday, March 6, 2012 06:58 PM |
| Sleep |
 by Fëanor |
I was telling some friends recently that parenthood sometimes feels like a series of failures. "Well, at least we don't do that!" we say, in reference to some particularly egregious parenting technique we've witnessed. And then we end up doing that.
Not that I think we're doing a terrible job or anything. He's healthy and happy, after all, and doesn't appear to be particularly murderous or satanic. But one of the things we were hoping we'd never do was put him in bed with us. It just seemed like a bad precedent to set - a step down a slippery slope. But a little while back, on a particularly hard night when we just couldn't handle hearing him scream in any longer, and we just wanted some peace, we did it. And for a while it seemed to be working okay. Each night, he'd sleep in his own crib quietly for a few hours, then he'd wake up screaming and we'd bring him in to bed with us and he'd go back to sleep there. We got kicked a little, and I nearly got shoved out of bed many times (there's no way it would have worked for even one night if we didn't have a king size), but we did all get some sleep, which was the important thing.
But then the slide down the slope began. He started waking up screaming earlier and earlier, until finally as soon as I put him in his crib he just popped right up and screamed and screamed. Basically he was refusing to sleep alone anymore at all.
And even this seemed bearable at first. But here's the problem: when we put him to bed before, poppy and I were able to go downstairs and enjoy some quiet time. We could watch some TV shows without cartoon animals in them, mess around on the computer or the Kindle, get some household chores done, or just sit there and stare at the wall without having to entertain the kid. It was time alone to decompress, and I didn't realize how precious it was until it was taken away. What with the loss of our alone time, the poor sleep, and the dog peeing all over the place, we started slowly going out of our minds.
So once we got the dog issue taken care of, we decided the next issue to tackle was the sleep problem. So last night we went back to the Ferber Method. The Ferber method basically means letting your kid cry it out. You go into his room at increasingly longer intervals to reassure him, with the idea that he will eventually learn to put himself to sleep. It's a method we used before with success the last time he nearly drove us out of our minds (which was two Christmases ago). You have to pretty much be at the end of your rope to use this method, because it is seriously rough to sit there and listen to your kid scream at two in the morning. Especially now that he can talk and he keeps calling you by name. In fact, the thought of doing it again was so horrific to me that I almost couldn't face it. But it needed to be done, and it wasn't going to get any easier, so we jumped in.
Well, poppy jumped in. She took the first shift and sent me out on an errand because she could tell I wasn't going to be able to hack it. But I managed to handle the late night shift with very little trouble, thanks in large part to my Kindle Fire and my Words with Friends buddies. Thank you, peeps! Thank you, Amazon! Thank you, poppy!
I'd like to think it will get easier and easier each night until in a few nights he'll be going down easy and sleeping through the night like he used to, but that's rarely the way these things work. Probably we will hit some bumps along the way. Still, I feel like we're driving in the right direction now, and that's something.
But yeah, if I seem cranky this week, you know why. |
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