Naptime Victory

It's no secret that we've been having some Serious Sleep Issues here. Daniel has yet to sleep through the night, he almost never naps more than 30 or 40 minutes at a time, and the cumulative effect of all this makes for one frazzled Suze. I thought my only options were 1) nurse him back to sleep every time he woke up, or 2) plunk him in the crib and leave him to cry it out all night long. Option 1 was clearly running me down and I wasn't about to do Option 2.

A little over a week ago, I had had it. I was tired, frustrated, and most of all discouraged that things weren't improving. I was in a horrible mood and I was being absolutely beastly to Stuart and Daniel. Understand that I am blessed with an even temperament and am rarely in a truly bad mood. But when it happens, hoo boy. Stay out of my way. So anyway, after some stomping around and slamming doors and generally immature behavior, I left the house to run some errands and clear my head.

In my hour or so out of the house and away from my problems, I also broke down and bought a baby book: The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems. Despite the obnoxious title, it had two things going for it, namely 1) I've heard that it works, and 2) Dr. Sears didn't write it.

According to the author, we've fallen prey to Accidental Parenting (I hate her terminology, by the way), wherein parents do all the wrong things without realizing it's hindering their child's ability to sleep on his own. Things like rocking and nursing him all the way to sleep before putting him in his crib. Things like letting him nurse every time he wakes up during the night. Ooooops. Of course, if you've got a child who's 10 months old already with these problems, it will take a while to fix them because - tsk tsk!! - you should have nipped it in the bud when he was four months old.

This is why I hate reading baby books. They make me feel guilty and kind of stupid.

In any case, the sleep method is absurdly simple. For a child Daniel's age, you have a routine for naps and bedtime to help him wind down...in our case, we already had the routine. It was (is) the actual sleeping that was the problem...and when he's ready to sleep, you put him in the crib. Of course, unless he's totally konked out, he'll cry and get up. So you put him down. He'll get up again. You put him down. Lather, rinse, repeat until he's too tired to get up again and falls asleep. Same at night time. When he wakes up, don't pick him up, but put him down, whisper soothingly, put him down, put him down, put him down, yada yada yada...until he falls back asleep.

Last week I wasn't totally convinced it was working. Three days in a row it took an hour of putting him down before he took a nap, which only lasted 30 minutes. Yes, an hour of standing by the crib making my child lie down. I was going nuts; I felt like I was held hostage (didn't I use that phrase in a previous post?) at the cribside. Fortunately, things are going much better at night. For one thing, Stuart and I could take turns, giving me a bit more rest. For another, almost every time Daniel wakes up, it takes just a couple minutes to get him back to sleep.

I confess that several, though not all, of Daniel's naps in the past few days have taken place in the car. This can be a case of "Accidental Parenting": relying on a prop like driving around to get your kid to sleep. But I didn't care, as I really needed to get out of the house.

The state of things now? Yesterday it took only 20 minutes to get him to sleep in the afternoon and this morning it took -- drum roll, please -- about 5 minutes. We still have a ways to go. He's not close to sleeping through the night, and he still doesn't sleep for more than 30 or 40 minutes at a time during the day. (That may never change; some kids are cat-nappers and there's nothing you can do about it.) But we have a Method, things are finally improving, and everyone's a little happier for it.