About every 2 to 3 months, we get sick of the routine, and tell him he's going to sleep in his bed all night. He cries himself to sleep, which takes between 2 and 15 minutes. He still wakes up around 3:00 a.m. and calls out to be rescued. I go in to his room, tell him it's still sleeping time and lay him back down. He cries a bit, but goes back to sleep and finishes out the night.
Our latest round of breaking the habit isn't going so well. He wakes up in the few seconds between leaving our bed and getting to his. He gets really, really angry, but eventually goes back to bed in his crib. Things didn't work out so well last night. Ben took him to his crib at 9:00. He cried and cried. And screamed. Loud. Either Ben or I went in about every 10 minutes to lay him down and remind him that he needed to sleep in his bed. We thought he'd fallen asleep a couple of times, only to hear him start over again with the screaming and jumping in anger. Ben and I fell asleep around 10:00. We thought he'd fallen asleep.
I woke up to hear him whimpering pitifully at midnight. I went in and found him sitting up in bed with a red, puffy, wet and tear-stained face. I felt horrible. Could he have been crying for 3 hours?! I scooped him up and brought him to bed with me. He fell asleep in the crook of my arm practically before my head hit the pillow. He was up again at 6:00 a.m. when I was up getting ready for pilates. Surprisingly, he was in a good mood, but still drowsy and his eyes were red and swollen. I just got this picture from our nanny:
He fell asleep on the way home from dropping James and Kate off at school. His eyes are still red. I failed parenthood last night. Poor, poor Robert.
1 comment:
Soooo sooo hard! The pediatrician advice is to not go in at all the whole night long. He will learn when he stirs awake in the night that it is dark and he should fall back asleep without calling for mama. After all, you probably stir awake 2 or 3 times a night, but you know just to reposition and go back to bed and not to scream and wake up Ben.
That being said, so hard to hear mama and crying and not go in and check and soothe. We finally got Peter to sleep through the night when I had a bunch of overnight shifts to work and he slept through the night each time. We learned it was more my problem of hearing him and "needing" to go get him, then him really needing me or his middle of the night feeding.
Good luck whatever you choose to do tonight! If you plan on breaking the wake up habit, maybe you should sleep with earplugs, downstairs??
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