Wait ... that is not an instinctual thing? I was taught to do this? Well my mum did a great job, when I asked her how she said something along the lines of "well you were never any trouble, we just laid you in your cot". Oh, so it is instinctual, or at least it was for me. Not for my son, he fights sleep, life is waaaaaaay too exciting, he cat naps during the day, very rarely in his cot and although he goes down fairly well at around 7pm most nights there is never any guarantee that he will not think that 2am-5am is an extra playtime.
Enter the world of sleep literature ... Pantley, Ferber, Weissbluth, Hogg ... the list goes on. Which method to choose? It depends essentially on your parenting style, do you want your child to learn to sleep painlessly without shedding a tear over a number of months or do you want to shut the door and walk away for three nights and let your child scream bloody murder? Then there is the reading material that says without crying it out they do not learn how to successfully self soothe and they will have issues when they go to school, but if you let them cry it out they will suffer with the feeling of abandonment their entire life. Oh and if you just keep getting up in the night with your baby and cuddling them until they are asleep they become dependent on that, but that is not the worst of it, no, the worst of it is that you spend those months of your life walking around like a zombie, forgetting things, making terrible decisions and not having the energy to actually teach your child to sleep and so making the vicious circle all the more vicious ... damn circle!!
This is where we are at. Ughhh. Six months of sleep deprivation, whoever decided to use it as a torture tool was a smart cookie - or a parent of a sleepless child and so understood the power of extreme exhaustion.
We had our six month check up a couple of days ago and my pediatrician happened to ask how the sleep was going. When I said not too good but I had made the rod for my own back and B had trained me rather than the other way round Dr G kindly pointed out that "you think it's hard now, in another year it will be worse when he is calling out your name". Oh crap. You mean we are not going to hit his six month birthday and he is not magically going to sleep through the night (this has been my very unrealistic, and yet very hopeful dream) you mean this could continue for a year or more? All the information from the books started flooding through my head ... do we cry it out? Do we pick up and put down? Do we take 10 months of gentle gentle? Then Dr G said it "do what you have to do. Don't pick him up but you can stay in the room, you know B better than anyone, he will cry a bit but make it as comfortable as you can for both of you". Decision made, put.the.books.away. The books have been stressing me out as much as the sleeplessness was, partly because the only chance I had to read them was when B was sleeping!! My life revolves around thoughts of sleep.
What is our plan of attack? We are going to go with the flow, we are going to try a number of things until we find something that works for us and our baby. Secretly I have my hopes pinned on the "crib soother" - a plastic fishtank that you strap onto the crib that has low light and movement ... I am believe that this is going to hypnotize him and all my problems will be solved at the touch of a button.
I have learnt many things whilst researching about sleep, the scientific facts were probably the most useful but the most important thing is that if ever you are looking to make a fortune create a product or book that you can market to sleep deprived parents and tell them it will solve their sleep issues, they will spend any amount of money if they think it will give them a chance to regain their nights of rest, and so their life. Our parents never had books, they did what felt intuitively correct to them and it seems to have worked. Wish me luck in my quest, I will keep you updated.
I have one last confession ... when B does sleep through the night there is a little bit of me that is going to miss him all warm and cuddled into me in the darkened room in the middle of the night listening to his breathing, there is something very special about that time.
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