Why do people tie a baby”s ability to be a “good baby” to a baby’s sleep? It’s ridiculous. I absolutely cannot count the number of times I was asked if Henry was a good baby. And people meant, “Is he sleeping through the night yet?” This started as early as one month of age when babies cannot sleep through the night without eating because their bellies aren’t large enough. And it isn’t other people’s questions about goodness that perpetuate this; new parents’ reminisce that if their first kid is a great sleeper, they think they are doing everything right. So we have internalized a child’s goodness based on his or her ability to be quiet and sleep.
Newsflash – this is not true! Parents of children who sleep through the night earlier are definitely better rested and able to be better functioning adults in terms of life and parenting skills, but these parents have won the sleep lottery and are incredibly lucky. Yay for them! Seriously. I wouldn’t wish sleep deprivation on my worst enemy; there’s a reason it is used as torture.
But what about the poor parents whose kid(s) don’t sleep well right away, or until months or years later? Your kids are good kids, too. They haven’t figured out this whole sleep thing yet. My son is awesome at so many things. He has hit all of his milestones early so far (with the exception of being able to get dressed and undressed; he can’t get his act together with that which is probably good because he would always be naked), and is generally happy and excited for life. He has gone through several sleep phases, however, that did not involve quality sleep for anyone. And we tried anything and everything (systematically) to get him to sleep. This includes nighttime sleep and naps.
After the newborn stage where he ate every 3-4 hours around the clock and slept most of the other time, until he was six months old he only woke up twice most nights to eat, which was totally doable because he would eat for about 10 minutes and then immediately fall asleep. Right before six months, things changed. He began crawling (without bothering to know how to sit up first), teething, and eating solid food all at once. The solids were no problem, the teething (and to some extent the crawling) definitely were. And our sleep suffered majorly for it for several months. We refused to do cry it out, but tried everything else we could to get him to sleep and stay asleep (at this point I can’t remember what we tried). We ended up co-sleeping a lot, which worked best for Henry, but not for me.
When Henry turned one, we decided to cut out night nursing, which involved Keith taking the reigns on quieting him at night and spending several nights sleeping on his floor. Keith can sleep anywhere like the dead so it wasn’t so so bad, but definitely not ideal. Hen got the hang of it quickly, realizing no mama milk would be forthcoming, but would not fall asleep unless Keith or I stayed in the room until he passed out. This new routine lasted a year (same for naps) – staying in his room until he fell asleep, then sneaking out like a ninja and hoping, wishing, and praying he wouldn’t wake up and we would have to return. He became better at putting himself to sleep when he woke up in the middle of the night using his Sleep Sheep (http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Travel-Sound-Machine-Soother/dp/B000J6CDY6/ref=pd_sim_75_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=07BXX5T5DP1GHZTPP0XQ), but never his Sleep Giraffe. If he ever had his Sleep Giraffe in his crib it was literally, “No, Giraffe, No!” when he had his midnight wake up. At this point, we would only need to help him quiet down once or twice a week in the middle of the night, which entailed telling him to go back to sleep and laying on the floor until he resumed sleeping in his crib. It got old, but it worked and I loved my own sleep so much I was willing to do whatever means necessary to keep it up.
When Henry was around 22 months old, he regularly started climbing out of his crib. This was unsafe, of course, and although he wasn’t getting hurt, we decided to convert his crib to a toddler bed. The first few weeks were rough. He didn’t want to stay in bed and definitely not in his room. He also wanted to play with his toys instead of sleeping. Our solution was threefold: (1) Keith flipped the lock around and we lock him in for sleep so he doesn’t wander the house and get into trouble; (2) he can sleep wherever he likes in his room – on the bed, the floor, even under the crib; and (3) we put his larger toys in the locked closet, keeping smaller toys and his books available if he’s not quite ready to sleep on schedule. It works! For now he’s sleeping better than he ever has before. It will change, I’m sure, but for now I feel like I’m winning at sleep.
