Then I realized that this is it's own rant.
Falling asleep in his favorite place - latched on with boob in his hands too!
A: Let's be honest - babies just generally AREN'T great sleepers.
B: Trust me, by the time I'm venting on Facebook about it I have tried EVERYTHING I can think of. Plus read about 1000 articles and talked to 10 bajillion people.
C: Once I'm mentioning how badly he's sleeping keep in mind that that very fact means that I haven't been sleeping well. Ok, so I'm tired, cranky, have a cranky baby, and not enough patience to give you a fully supported well worded rebuttal of why exactly whichever method didn't work for us. Stop expecting a fully rational 2000 word report on my techniques - just accept that I tried everything I could and it didn't work.
There is not one method that works every time for this boy. If he eats the wrong food at the wrong time or if the wrong noise happens at just the right time - nap is skipped. If we are 2 minutes early or 10 minutes late for nap time, it fails. Nap time is also a totally subjective time, affected by the last time we peed, pooped, ate, how well he slept/didn't in the previous 48 hours, how many layers of clothes he has on, whether the boob is the perfect amount of full on the side he currently wants, when he was last in the car, how exciting dad and the dog are, and whether Mars is in the 5th house of Juno...or something. In other words, it's a total crapshoot. I read that some kids have a great eating and sleeping schedule from 5 weeks on. ROCK ON YOU GUYS! That's awesome for you. However, I don't have anything resembling an easy time anticipating how much food or sleep I want/need/get at any given time as an adult. I don't expect him to be perfect at this yet. I DO expect he'll get better when he's growing and changing slower - so he can adapt to things either. Right now, we can't keep straight how long he can stand to be awake or asleep - it changes every week or two - so we roll with the punches as well as we can. This week a surprise thunderstorm seemed to stop all the little boys in the area from sleeping at night, even those that generally sleep pretty well. So that just is.
Look, he fell asleep finally! In a terrible location and 5 minutes before we needed to leave on a 90 minute car ride. He usually sleeps in the car great though! Not this day. He took about an hour to fall back asleep after the transfer. Of course.
Stop judging me and assuming that I'm not doing my best or haven't really tried your methods for sleep. Stop telling me I'm doing it wrong, or getting mad when I say that I already tried your advice but it didn't work. ESPECIALLY if you only had one kid, or all of your kids were born years and years ago. Please keep in mind that my baby and me are not you and your baby. Unfortunately Legan has at least SOME of my genes (I swear, there's just not manifesting physically!), and I was always a bad sleeper.
That all being said, yes, I know he will get better. We go through cycles. We usually have one decent sleep week, and then 2-3 bad weeks in a row.
It's 6 am and I shouldn't be up for another 2 hours mom, but I am slapping you in the face while headbutting you in the chin and stomping on your bladder and c-section incision. Good MORNING!
I handle the bad weeks best when I stop putting any expectations on his sleep. When I just accept that it's going to be terrible. I need to be pessimistic about his sleep - because then when he unexpectedly DOES get some good hours in, I'm ecstatic. If I go in optimistic (after 2 days of nice long naps I got totally over confident and started EXPECTING good things), and it all blows up in my face (skipped 2 out of 3 naps yesterday, and 3 nights in a row has been up 4-6 times sometimes for more than an hour) I feel totally cheated, betrayed, and honestly pissed off. Now, if I wake up on a day, and just say "Well, here's my boy and I know he's going to nap and sleep like crap," and he does, then I'm just quietly resigned and chill about it. Not happy, but accepting. I do a really terrible job of accepting awfulness when I expect decency, so it's in my best interests to just assume he's going to be terrible at sleeping all the time. That keeps my blood pressure down.
I've read up on so-called sleep training. What makes me laugh though is it takes parents of stubborn babies roughly 1-2 weeks to get it down. Then they RAVE about their success for 2 ish weeks. Then anytime baby hits a milestone or a life change (change in weather, learns a new skill, goes through a growth spurt, gets a tooth, there's a holiday, takes a vacation, has a routine change, etc) they have to start over and it takes another week or two to get back on track. HA! Well with my life that would be basically continuously being in sleep training mode. Nope, I'll just nurse him to sleep and accept that I'm getting up shortly, thanks. Again, with just expecting it to suck just makes everything simpler for me.
Pretty sure I started sleeping OK at night when I was about 3. So 2.5 years to go!
This is a really happy baby after a totally unexpected 3 hour nap!
Legan looking like he murdered someone with all the blackberry juice everywhere!
I forgot to include this with the Christmas update. One scary "decoration"
AND.....
Little man is ALMOST crawling.
No comments:
Post a Comment