Our journey with Xavier has been more intense and educational than my college career at CMU. At least after an intense day in Mt. Pleasant, I could go out for drinks and dancing with my friends...every.single.night. Just now, I had to take his sippy cup of milk away because he was "watering" his toys with it. Then, after a minor tantrum, I asked him to wipe his own runny nose with a burp rag. He did. Such is my life living with the little boy whose kisses sometimes turn to biting and is so intense when playing with his Potato Heads.
The worst part of this journey...actually, there are two parts....are his sleeping and general disipline. But this post is about sleeping. It is funny how my previous post was about crying it out. Still not a fan at all. The problem was I enjoyed nursing him and rocking him to sleep that it became a sleep crutch or negative sleep association.
At 3 months, we started swaddling xavier, again and it worked. He started sleeping 3-4 hours at a time. Problem was, we couldn't break him of the swaddle or the nursing at night or the rocking to sleep. So, we would get him to sleep and then swaddle him and then have to get him back to sleep. We were so naivee. When I look back, I just smile and shake my head.
When Xavier was 7 months old, though, we realized something had to be done. No one was sleeping. He was up every 3 hours. He also couldn't be swaddled forever. I could just hear him asking his college roommates to swaddle him before bed. We broke him of the swaddle and got him into his beloved sleep sacks (still have to keep him in those to prevent him from climbing out of his crib). I went to the library and checked out two books recommended by Baby 411: Sleeping Through The Night by Jodi Mindell, Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems by Richard Ferber and Let The Children Come Along The Infant Way by Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo. Some of what I read terrified me but all of them taught me something. I went with Dr. Ferber's book in the end.
Now hold on, anyone out there who just cringed. It isn't all about crying. I had already decided I wasn't going to shut the door on X until he cried himself to sleep. Ferber actually wants as little tears as possible. But to undo some of these habits, X was going to have to cry some. So was mommy. We had a wonderful bedtime routine, too. Bath, snack, stories, prayers, songs, rocking to sleep, put in crib asleep, sneak out of room, wake up 2 hours later, rock back to sleep, wake up 2 hours later, rock back to sleep, etc.
I learned a lot from Dr. Ferber about sleep. The most important was about sleep cycles. As we sleep and move from one sleep cycle to the next (non-REM to REM and back again), we do an environment check. If everything is the way it was when we fell asleep, we go right back to sleep without waking up. But if your 7 months pregnant and realize you have to pee, then you will fully wake up to go. Or, if you dropped your pillow, you will wake up a little to get it. Or, if you fell asleep on the couch and realize you are now in bed, you will wake up confused, perhaps disoriented and try to figure out how you got into the bed. For Xavier, he would wake up and think "wait, I'm not rocking anymore and my mom is gone." He would then fully wake up and need those same conditions in which he fell asleep the first time to get back to sleep this time. Hence, crying out for someone in the middle of the night, several times a night because he needed us to help him go back to sleep. He didn't know how to do it on his own.
