Go the F to Sleep

If anyone wants to buy Liam a birthday gift, this is #1, #2, #3 and #4 on my wish list for him

I have to make a confession.

I am absolutely, hideously, atrociously terrible at establishing good bedtime habits for our children. But phenomenally awful.

Not when they’re older! No, the girls are a dream to put down. Brush the teeth, give the blessing, say the prayers, give them kisses, order them sternly to stop whatever shenanigans they’re starting and tell them that if they get out of bed they’re going to be punished dreadfully, and they’re done for the night.

But this is always a post-2-year development. Pre-2, we do a weird mash-up of co-sleeping and sometimes using the crib. We only really did the cry-it-out method with Charlotte, and up until that point, I nursed, walked, rocked, coaxed, wheedled and finally handed the babies off to the Ogre, who worked some kind of voodoo magic on the little devils(he called it patience).

With Sienna, this meant that she didn’t really start sleeping in her own bed until she was almost three, and even then she ended up on our floor half the time.

Charlotte was a special case. At the age of nine months, she flat-out refused to sleep in bed with us anymore, so we moved her to a crib and after crying for about five minutes, she has slept happily on her own, and then with Sienna, ever since. To this day, she doesn’t sleep well with anyone but Sienna.

The bad thing about that was that the Ogre and I got a taste of what life could be like if we established good bedtime habits and actually put our children down in the early evening.

Conversations. Leisurely glasses of wine. Television marathons. Jewelry making. Sex.

Yeah, life was sweet for those two weeks before Liam was conceived. And it was pretty sweet after those two weeks, since Charlotte was a champion at bedtime.

But Liam…oh…oh…oh.

Oh.

I may look angelic, but if you feed me after midnight I’ll eat your soul

Just so you don’t have any misconceptions, this is at least 50% his fault. The problem is that he’s always been such an easy baby. Even when he was a newborn, I would nurse him after I put the girls down and…and…he would just fall asleep. And stay asleep when I laid him on our bed, or in his crib as he grew.

I thought to myself, “Self, we could get used to this.” And get used to it we did. For ten blissful months, the little man went down at eight and stayed asleep until just about the time I crawled into bed myself, at which point I would just pull him into bed with me and he’d sleep the rest of the night all curled up against me. Sure, we had the occasional rough night, but those were so few and far between that I saw no reason to change anything.

And then.

And then.

I don’t understand what is happening now. He will not sleep. I spend, on average, two to three hours a night trying to get him to sleep before gingerly placing him in his crib, only to have him immediately wake up and scream 75% of the time. He flails around at night, sleeping fitfully in the bed with me, scrambling to both nurse and push me away at the same time. He is absolutely, completely incapable of putting himself back to sleep. And he spends the days crawling around, slightly hysterical, trying to both play and rub his eyes at the same time.

And I am turning into a bleary-eyed zombie. An angry bleary-eyed zombie.

I can hear you now. Come on, Calah! Show a little chutzpuh and let the little guy cry it out! It won’t kill him!


Oh, my friends, how desperately I agree with you.

Here’s the problem: you may have noticed that we’re living with my parents at the moment, so we’re all four staying in one room. Therefore, if I would like two of my three children to sleep at night, I can’t train the third one to.

It’s a dilemma, no? Compounded by my desperate, desperate need for actual hours of sleep instead of hour.

The Ogre is coming into town on Wednesday, and the Coach and Sasha Feroce (those are my in-laws, remember?) are going out of town for four days. We’re staying in their four-bedroom house, so my plan is to do a crash-course in sleep-training.

Here’s my attack plan so far:

8pm: put Liam in the crib
8:01pm: walk out the door

It’s a work in progress, I’ll admit. Do y’all have any suggestions? I have let him cry it out a few times for naps, including today. I’d say on those occasions he cried for an average of 45 minutes and slept for an average of 20. This seems excessively long to me for such a short period of sleep, but maybe it’s not. I dunno. Maybe I just need to leave him in the crib longer.

I do know that something must be done if I am to retain any semblance of sanity. So here I am, begging for your help. Do you guys have any concrete suggestions? (Please, please don’t recommend a book. I know that books help, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to read a book about sleep training when I could be sleeping.)

Also, if you let your little angel cry it out and it successfully helped you establish a bedtime routine, tell me your story! It will comfort me in the coming days, when I’m trying to pretend Liam isn’t wailing his poor little lungs out.

Maybe one of these times I’ll learn and actually establish healthy sleep habits early in life, like my BFF Meg is always telling me to do. But, well, better late than never? Maybe?