Sleep Train of Thought
Is Sleep Train a national chain? If I sing “Sleep Traaaain,” do you follow with “The ticket to a better night’s sleep?” I hope so.
Well, Fox is almost six months old (here I gasp), and having successfully sleep-trained infant Wombat in a mere three days at eight months old, we always said we wish we’d done it earlier (specifically before he learned to pull up on his crib rail and rattle it like an incensed Kong), and so poor little second child, the time is upon us and YOU WILL SUBMIT OR SUFFER THE WRATH. WRATH FOLLOWED BY APOLOGETIC SNUGGLES. We do a kind of Cry-It-Out Lite™, which involves the proper amount of hand-wringing and hard-assedness to make us feel smugly triumphant over a 15-pound baby without also feeling like total monsters. If you do any form of CIO, my tip for you (and, uh, for me) is to use a timer because otherwise five minutes of whimpering and the occasional shout can feel like an hour of distraught garment rending. (Had I not clipped Fox’s nails earlier this morning, I’d fear waking to find his little blue gingham jammies shredded in a jagged patch at each hip, where his hands are pinned in his swaddle.) Now, we never actually read Ferber, just skimmed the book while Baby Wombat crawled around the no doubt perfectly clean carpet at Barnes and Noble, but I’m certain the section titled “But What If My Baby Rends His Garments?” was very short and consisted solely of the sentence “UR DOIN IT WRONG,” so we’re trying to avoid that.
Anyway, tonight is the first official hard-core–yet caring!–foray into teaching Fox how to stay asleep and put himself back to sleep if he insists upon waking up every three or four hours, and oh, although these waters are familiar and we charted them not four years ago, it’s actually quite a different experience sailing again when you’re attempting to steer a–surprise!–completely different kind of boat, go figure. [Insert joke about the poop deck here.] Wombat’s trouble was falling asleep in the first place, but once he was down he was down for good; all this new-fangled wake-up-in-the-pitch-dark-and-start-rooting-for-boob nonsense is, uh, nonsense up with which we will obviously not put.
So, hey, have you heard that you can figure out (to an extent) how to parent your first kid but then the next one will come along with a whole fresh list of issues and demands and you’ll be back at square one, or possibly square two if the kids are similar and/or you’re smarter than the average parent and/or you’ve sold your soul for a little extra bit of luck? This is nothing new, of course, but by god, what about parenthood ever is (answer: not a thing), and so isn’t talking about it with other parents mostly just swapping war stories? Instead of ‘Nam and Korea, we talk about surviving Aiden and Sophia. We are heroes, you guys. Heroes with medals splashed across our chests in milk-barf and who knows what else. (Don’t smell it to find out.)
The shared trauma of parenthood brings us closer together, TROOTH, and this, incidentally, is what our holiday crew (my family of four + Simon’s sister’s family of four + my MIL and her beau) were saying after the three-ring circus that was taking four small children to Shogun, where it’s fun to watch a trained chef do a little show as he cooks your food on the grill right there at your table and absolutely no one swirls her chopsticks in her Shirley Temple or gets loose and almost ends up in the koi pond or opens the meal with screams of “Fire! Fire! No fire! It’s too hot! I’m melting!” and then has to be put in time out behind the rubber tree plant for flagrant high-sticking in the vicinity of his mother’s wage-earning eyeballs. (Guess which one was Wombat?)
Yes. Shared trauma. We can now say “Shogun” and widen our eyes with a look of knowing terror and all adults present that night immediately pale and understand and back down from whatever “fun” proposition was so foolishly put forth moments earlier. But please compare this with that week’s earlier trip to Disneyland, which was NOT a Shogun, as the kids were good as little long-limbed gold nuggets. They waited patiently in lines, they loved some rides and declared others “too scary for me” but without any bat-shit freak-outs, and we stayed with the four- and five-year-old until midnight(!) and not once did either of them have to bare a forearm inked with his or her parent’s phone number after (a) he or she wandered off and got separated from the group or (b) his or her parents shouted “Look over there!” and then took advantage of the moment’s diversion to run in the opposite direction. In conclusion, Disneyland = good, Shogun = bad. Even then, when asked which they preferred for an afternoon of rollicking good times, the kids concurred that Disneyland was great and all but the bouncy house place in the mall, was even way super better. Do not ask me how much they loved the $1 carousel at the mall. Sigh.
Anyway, I seem to have broken down any hopes of a coherent narrative in this, my first post of 2013 (weird!), so I’m going to go crawl in bed and cross my fingers and toes and eyes that Fox doesn’t fart himself awake juuuuuust as I’m finally going to sleep. (I shouldn’t have had that Oreo right before bed, and yes, I’m totally getting back on the healthy-eating bandwagon in the new year but I can’t start until the Oreos are gone, so STOP JUDGING ME.)
(Can you tell my brain has been on vacation too?)
Happy New Year to you!
Sometimes, in this vast universe of Internetedness ( a word now, yes), I stumble across a single post that makes me snort-laugh because it so perfectly expresses my own ridiculous life. This was one.
I’m engaged in my own half-assed sleep training right now too. Good luck. Stay strong.
Upon your suggestion/encouragement/whatever I’ve joined up with the biggest blogging loser 2013, but until it starts, I’m enjoying all of the food things I will miss in another week. I’m too Dutch to waste the food and too much of a food lover to let it leave my house.
Enjoy the Oreos is what I’m saying. And good luck with the sleep training.
But how was Christmas?! How did it go with the (not as good as yours) traditions? Best of luck with the sleep training. We will not be having a third child because I cannot go through that again. It was not easy for us. At all.
This made me laugh out loud, and then go back and read again out loud. Love it. “nonsense up with which we will obviously not put.”
YES, I am determined to get Elise to go to sleep on her own before she starts crawling and my wonderful post bedtime life ends. Jacob wanted to sleep with me and I could not do that when he was crawling unless I wanted to go to bed at 8 PM too. We just switched Elise to her big girl crib this weekend and the first time was horror, but last night she slept longer in the crib than she had in the PnP, so I’m sure that’s a fluke. Right? Right.
This is the week where I get my shit together eating wise so that next week I can start working out too when BBL starts. Can you come eat my Oreos too? I don’t even like the damn things which is why I got the, but I still can’t stop thinking about them.
Please come eat all the Oreos.
Ugh, sleep training. I half assed tried to sleep train my soon to be eight month old when she was six months old and it did not go well. Mostly did not go well for me, I think she was juuuust fine. So now I am back to my rocking, nursing, co-sleeping self which allows me to cobble together enough sleep to function. For now. I keep putting off that which I know will be inevitable. Good luck!
Happy New Year!
So how did the night go? I’m eager to know! We our half-assesly sleep training our five month old.. Trying to get to just one night waking, so I need to hear your successes and/or horror stories to feel I’m not alone!
I love that you used the word half-assedness. I paced a lot, and mumbled to myself like a crazy person, as our girls each “cried it out”. My husband had to stop me at least 20 times from rushing to their cribs and picking them up, because that kind of defeats the purpose of getting them to sooth themselves, doesn’t it? Sleep training sucks, you just have to “press on regardless”, until you get to the other side. Good luck, and stay strong mama!!! I love Oreos too…yum.
Good luck with the sleep training. I couldn’t do it with my first because she was(is) the kind of kid that will only become more and more hysterical if she is left crying. My second one isn’t as bad, but now I’m the one who can’t sleep if he’s not in bed with me. Many nights of him sleeping 6 hrs or more straight, while I wake up every hour listen for him. I’ve decided I’m in for the family bed for a long time (husband is okay with this).
I don’t know if Sleep Train is or not but as a former Bay Area resident, you got it stuck in my head. Just wanted to let you know.
Good luck with the sleep training! Our little guy is seven months old, and did our own version of CIO Lite about two months ago (until then, the baby, my husband and I were SO tired all the time that it had to be done). It definitely sucked for a few nights, but once we got over the bump everyone has been MUCH happier. We use a white noise machine, and I think it really helps soothe him back to sleep. It goes on for every nap and at bedtime so that he associates the noise (we use the “ocean” setting) with sleep. So far, so good!