sleep

Pre-amendment: I started this post more than a week ago and worked on it for days but by the time I had gotten to the end that you'll see below, Asher's sleep had regressed basically back to where it was in the beginning. It's spotty now, goes back and forth, and I just don't have the stamina or enthusiasm to bring you up to speed in detail. Instead, we'll just say that the story's still to be continued...

Second pre-amendment: I wrote that a couple of days ago (yes I know, this is getting ridiculous) but couldn't post because Daniel had to change our blogger password after his email got hacked and apparently -- this is the shocker -- we haven't blogged since then. Yeah. I know. Maybe you involved in his email hacking, but if you weren't, you should know it was a long, long time ago. So we got that changed yesterday, but since daniel had a post that was timely (and since it was fathers day, after all), I let him go first :) so hope you followed all that. If not. Oh well.




What. The. Heck.

Is that what you've thought every time you've opened our blog for the last...whatever...month and a half? (amendment--basically two months.) It's kind of what I imagine people thinking.

And if you know what we've been doing, there was Easter, and we went home to Atlanta and Asher had his first taste of Georgia, and the first mother's day, and just plenty to be blogging about.

So let me try to give you a glimpse into our excuse. It involves a sleep-less baby.

So starting like two months ago, Asher decided that he really didn't need sleep. Oh, sleep at night, sure. He sleeps with us and it's cozy in our bed. But naps? Nah.

So he started being impossible to get to go to sleep for naps. He would get yawny. And then start rubbing his eyes. And then squirmy. And then fussy. And no matter how early we tried to catch it, or how late we'd let it drag out, he'd never crash. We'd make the room as dark as possible. We set up a pre-nap routine so that he'd know to expect it. Nothing. He'd fuss through the entire nap time until he got his second wind and then be "ready" to go again--except as the day went on, he was harder and harder to deal with. There were several times that he slept a total of 20 minutes over two days. Seriously. 20 minutes. 2 days.

Then one day we learned how to bounce. It was a very specific method of bouncing that he required. Conditions had to be perfect. Walking--don't even try to sit. And holding in a very particular way. And bounce. Hard. And I think the first time we bounced he fell asleep in maybe 10 minutes. Okay. We could take 10 minutes of that for a glorious 40 minute nap.

Well. It wasn't days before 10 minutes became 20 minutes became 40 minutes. So now we bounced. And bounced, and bounced, and bounced. And once he finally fell asleep let's not even talk about the acrobatics it required to lay him down. Then. (Yes, there's more.) He started not even always falling asleep after the 40 minutes of bouncing. He'd be getting calmer and quieter somewhere in the middle of it, and even close his eyes a bit, and Daniel and i would give each other the "success!" look, but then they'd pop back open and he'd start getting squirmy and then fussy, as if we'd somehow missed it. And he started fussing his way to his second wind again, even through all the bouncing.

Then the last part. About three weeks ago, he started, whenever he did sleep, only sleeping for 20 minute increments, max. I don't know. He'd just wake up after 20 minutes, and we'd rush to him (or oftentimes still be sitting there next to him) to replace a pacifier or gently shake/rock him, or quickly pick him up to start bouncing again. But nothing. So now we were talking about 40 minutes of bouncing for sometimes no reason at all, and at best 20 minutes of napping.

And we like our backs and think they're pretty necessary.

So of course while all this was going on I had read every sleep book I could. And I started with all the no-cry books. No cry sleep solutions. No-cry nap solutions. Dr. Sears' book. On and on. Nothing was helping.

So it came to the breaking point. And before you chastise me for letting it go so long without letting him cry, know the he was still pretty young for cry it out (CIO). Most books say you can start "ferberizing" as they call it in the biz at 6 months. But you can find a couple of places that say 3-4 months, and Asher had just turned 4 months. And I know, you did it to your child from day one and they're fine. I don't know. I just do what I'm told.

So I switched to reading all the let them cry sleep books. If we did this we were going to do it right. And it's not that I was completely against this, by the way. I mean, these days you can find about a million moral objections to it online, but that wasn't necessarily me. I just didn't want it to have to come to this. I mean, who wants to let their baby cry?

We did the method where you go in to comfort at progressively long intervals. So the first day you go in at three minutes then five then seven and so on. And the second day five then seven then ten and you get the idea. You go in the room and talk to him and comfort and touch him, but you don't pick him up. And for nighttime there's no time limit for how long he cries, but for naps if he cries for an hour, you go in and get him and he just skips that nap.

So we started and I'll spare you the gory play-by-play, but suffice it to say that for the first three days, at every nap (so three times a day) and then at bedtime, Asher cried for an average of 50 minutes. Four times a day. It was excruciating. I actually left most every time, and Daniel stayed to listen and comfort (which meant he had to endure the terribly sad face and pitiful cry).

There were times when he cried for 75 minutes and several naps that he just cried through. And I wish I could say that it was just fussiness, but no. It was all out screaming. Excruciating. I feel l like most of the people I had talked to who had done this had done it together their child to sleep through the night. And I know it's got to be terrible to listen to your child cry all night--Which I know has to be worse than what we endured in a lot of ways--but it was terrible to feel like Asher cried all. Day. Long. By the time he had stopped crying at night we would just lay out on the couch physically and emotionally exhausted and drained.

The only thing that carried me through those days was that the one thing that every sleep books agrees on is how crucial sleep is. That it's as important to a baby's development as eating. And that naps are the holy grail of sleeping. Half way through that week, I was carefully searching for encouragement online (and trying to avoid all the condemners--I had read all that before I started) and found the single most encouraging thing I could find. It said something to the effect of "I think you're a good mother for doing this. If your baby weren't eating you'd do whatever it took to get him to eat. And this is just as important."

So that carried me. That, and the fact that Asher woke up happy. Happier, even. And while he was awake he was happy. And we didn't have to work real hard to keep him that way.

During those first few days there were certainly times when it didn't feel natural at all. I often try to think about Asher the way God thinks about us, and it just didn't feel like what he does. But I knew it was necessary. And a lot of times it really did feel right. But by Wednesday when it wasn't really seemingly working we about had a break down. There wasn't really a steady decrease in crying and I knew if it didn't get better soon we'd have to stop.

Then one night he cried for 35 minutes.

Then the next morning at his nap he cried for 25.

Then 10.

Ten minutes. We felt like we'd won the lottery.

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