SLEEP

The last three nights, we've been letting Lil cry it out. The first night was pretty painful for me, for her, and for our upstairs neighbors--she woke up at 4:15 and cried off and on, but mostly on -- until we decided to just go ahead and get up at 7:15. 

It was three hours of agony. 

But the second night, last night, she slept for 6 hours straight, tying her personal record. Tonight, she cried for only 20 minutes before she fell asleep. I don't want to get my hopes up too high about when she'll wake up, but hopefully she's getting the clue that there's nothing fun and exciting waiting for her if she wakes up before the sun is up. 

I had been feeling very conflicted about the sleep thing. On one hand, Scott and I are both really, really tired. For the most part, she has been a good sleeper since she was tiny, waking up once and only occasionally twice during the hours when we were sleeping. But lately, she'd been having clusters of nights of when she woke up at all hours. And with little to no sleep in our sleep banks, one bad night felt fairly devastating. Two bad nights in a row and I started to lose IQ points and we turned in to the Bickersons. 

On the other hand, hearing her cry true cries of distress makes me sweat blood. Call me a sissy if you must, but it's been as much of a physical reaction as an emotional one, and enduring long periods of crying felt like more than I could do. 

When I talked to our pediatrician about taking some steps to getting Lil to sleep for longer stretches when she was 3-1/2 months old, he basically laughed and said, "Think of breastfeeding as nurturing. Is it bad for a baby to wake up in the middle of the night and want to be nurtured? No." Then, last week when we were in for some of her vaccines, I asked him about it again, and he said we needed to let her cry it out. I was totally confused and feeling shoved out of the nest with no parachute, as if he had told us we needed to drive from New York to LA but neglected to give us any directions for getting across the middle of the country. Was there no middle ground? No way to help her make the transition to sleeping through the night without crying it out? 

Then two separate friends recommended the book "Good Night, Sleep Tight," and I devoured the chapter on 6-9 month olds. It spends a lot of time talking about ways you can help babies learn how to sleep on their own: put them down when they're tired but still awake, give them a stuffed animal or blanket they can use to comfort themselves, feed them as soon as they wake up so that they disassociate nursing with sleeping. And she suggests that instead of putting them down and leaving them to cry alone, that you sit with them until they fall asleep, and gradually work your way out of the room. It felt a lot gentler to me, so that's what I did that first tortuous night. And I soon learned two things: 1) Having me nearby without picking her up is more upsetting to Lil than if I leave her alone. 2) No matter what happens in the night,  she wakes up smiley and happy. So now the sound of her crying isn't totally devastating. Just mildly painful. Like, maybe, a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10. And getting six hours of consecutive sleep? Priceless.  

While all this is going on, we're disassembling our guest bedroom/my office and turning it into Lil's room. She'll still have to share with my desk for a while, but we should (knock wood) be able to move her in there in the next two weeks. It's kind of weird to be nesting with no pregnancy hormones to propel me. But it's also cool to be planning her room with the benefit of knowing a little bit about her. I'm making her some curtains (wish me luck, it's only my third sewing project, and these will be lined, with grommets, oy), and I think I've found a rocking chair on Craigs List, and I foresee a trip to IKEA in my future. I'll post pictures when it's done. In the meantime, here's an old photo of Lil napping. Aw.