Sleeping Revisited

A few weeks ago I mentioned that Oliver was having some sleep issues. The issue? He wasn’t sleeping. He went a few weeks there where his first stretch of sleep would be five or six hours, he’d wake up to eat for ten minutes and then fall asleep again until around 6 am. Not exactly sleeping through the night but I was pretty happy only having to get up once a night with him. During his fourteenth week, however, that reliable (though not ideal) sleep schedule completely disappeared. That week he started fighting bedtime for over an hour (he would drift to sleep in my arms and then start screaming as soon as I put him in his crib) and he was getting up anywhere from three to five times a night. I was about ready to lose my mind. I felt like a zombie the days after he would wake up so many times and it got to the point where I spent the whole day dreading bedtime and the battle it would bring. I felt horrible because I wasn’t enjoying my time with Oliver during the day to the full extent because I was obsessing about trying to put him to bed later that night.

Recently things have gotten a little better. He’s gone back to waking up only two times a night but he’s still fighting bedtime every once in awhile. I convinced myself that he was waking up that many times a night because he still needed to eat every five hours but then the little knucklehead showed his hand (big mistake, Oliver!) on Monday night. I put him to bed at 8:30 and he slept until 5:30 - a full nine hours. That’s the longest stretch he’s ever done and proof that he can go longer without eating than he’s led me to believe. Then I started to think back to all those nights of two wakings and realized that he wasn’t even really eating when he did wake up. He would only be up for about ten minutes and although I would offer him a meal, he would only comfort suck and then go back to sleep. So, it turns out, I’m a human pacifier and Oliver’s pretty dependent on me to get himself to sleep in the first place (hence the bedtime battles) and also needs me to get him back to sleep when he wakes up in the middle of the night. Now, it’s nice to feel needed but I need my sleep so this whole human pacifier thing has got to stop and soon! Oliver’s got to figure out how to get himself to sleep and how to go back to sleep when he wakes up in the middle of the night and I’m slowly coming to the realization that I’m going to have to teach him this valuable skill so that we can both get a good night’s sleep. 

So, we’ve got a trip to Madison next weekend for Brea’s wedding and then a pediatrician visit the week after for his four-month and if she gives the go-ahead we’re going to start some gentle sleep training after that. No more napping in the swing, no more swaddling and hopefully no more bedtime battles and endless night wakings. I don’t think we’re ready for full-on cry it out (hopefully we can catch this early enough that some “fuss it out” will do) but I’m prepared to go there if need be (the screaming session in the car on the way home from Midland showed me that I can, in fact, listen to my child scream... it sucks but I can do it). Hopefully we can all start getting some better sleep around here.