For a little while there we had a good sleeper. Will would go down without a fight around 6:30 each night and sleep solidly through until around 6 the next morning. He would go down around 10 for a nap lasting usually about 2 hours. It was awesome. Will was waking up happy and chatty. I would wake up in the morning to hear him talking to his favorite stuffed animal, Woof-Woof. I was relatively well rested. I had "me time" in the afternoon to get things done. I felt like a good mom.
And then something happened. He started waking up in the night. He started getting up early (like in the 5 o'clock hour), which would throw off the whole day and his usual nap schedule. He stopped taking good naps. He woke up grumpy and crying all the time. I surmised that it was his molars coming in since he's about that age and since he started chewing on his fingers/drooling freqently. So we began giving him infant ibuprofen before putting his to sleep for nap and bedtime. And for a short period of time this seemed to work. However, no teeth have appeared and sleeping conditions have worsened again. I am at a loss. Why is it that you can never stay in a happy groove for very long?! Just about the time you get comfortable and feel like perhaps you have things figured out, everything just kind of falls apart. Parenthood is so frustrating like that.
Today Will woke up around 5:15 and fussed until Jamie brought him back to our bed at 5:30, where he continued to fuss. I finally got up with him at 5:45 and brought him downstairs. We played and watched Sesame Street and all was good for a little while. We even met our friends at the park to play for an hour. And then we came home and he went down for a nap. It used to be that he knew the routine and would roll over and fall asleep when I put him in his crib after rocking him for a while. But now he needs a bottle to relax, and though he falls asleep easily in my arms, he wakes up and cries the minute I put him down. That's a total regression to how he was before that month I spent teaching him how to nap again. Anyway, I left and let him cry it out. He slept for about 30 minutes or so before he woke up crying. That's not a long enough nap to do any good so I sat here watching the monitor and let him cry. He cried off and on for like, 40 freaking minutes. CIO is easier for me now that he's older, but it still sucks. Anyway, he finally fell back asleep at 11. It is now 1 o'clock and he's starting to wake up. And he's not crying. That's how I know he finally, FINALLY got all his sleep out. This was a hard fought battle. It is gratifying to know that letting him cry was probably the right decision and that now he's got a solid 2 hour nap under his belt and is in a good mood. And the thing about sleep training is that usually it doesn't take as long to get back on track as it does to establish good sleeping habits in the first place. Here's hoping there won't be many more battles like this one before I win the war. Again.
We drank a bottle and watched some of Cars after waking up from our nap today. Partly to wake up gently, and partly because Mommy felt like a meanie for letting him cry. What a rough life he leads.
After writing this post and thinking about things, I feel kind of stupid. I can easily come up with two reasons why Will might be struggling with sleep right now besides his molars (though I'm not convinced that teething isn't playing at least a partial role). There's the fact that we're in a new house. True, we've been here for about 3 weeks now, but moving in was preceded by 6 weeks of homelessness spent either at my parents' house or at my in-laws' house. His sleep schedule hasn't been truly normal in quite some time really, so it's absurd that I would have any expectations that he would settle back into one so quickly. And then there's the issue of my being hugely pregnant. My body is changing so quickly in these last weeks before the baby comes. I'm not his normal mommy anymore. I don't feel the same when I hold him to rock him to sleep what with the big belly in the way. I probably don't move the same way or have the same kind of energy or activity level when playing with him. He can't even look me in the eye when he comes over to hang on my legs or get my attention since there is no seeing past the belly. That has to be affecting him. And as I've found in the past nearly 15 months, sleep disruption is usually the first indicator that something is up. So, despite my own desperate need for sleep and "me time," I'm just going to have to be tolerant and understanding as we work through this. It's tough being a little kid sometimes.
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