Every night, the following occurs chez Cox: It's approximately 7 pm, and the baby is starting his cranky, tired, I've-had-enough-of-this-day fussing. Getting him down for the night is embarrassingly easy: five minutes invested in the glider, nursing, and he's out like a light. And every night, I come out of the baby's room swearing up, down and sideways that THIS TIME, for REAL, I'm SERIOUS, the baby is going to stay in his crib until the morning. I MEAN IT.
And every morning, without fail, the baby is snuggled and snoozing sweetly between Andy and I, with his little cold feet warming themselves on my tummy and his little face nestled on my chest.
I'm not claiming I don't know how he got there. Every night I get up and bring him into our bed. The problem is, he won't sleep more than four hours in a row unless he's in bed with me. It's terrible, because it sets up this catch-22 every night: I either listen to him wail, and neither of us get any sleep, or just go in and get him, put him in the bed with me, and we both sleep until morning. But every time I go get him, I'm teaching him that continuing to wail is the way to get what he wants, which is to get in bed with us. It's a lose-lose.
So the conventional wisdom is, I have to let him cry it out. But here's the thing: He doesn't cry it out. He just cries. Everyone tells me that I should just let him cry, and eventually he will go back to sleep. But he doesn't! One night I steeled myself and said that no matter what, come hell or high water, I would not go in. I would let him "self-soothe". I would wait until he went back to sleep on his own. Except he never did! He cried from midnight until 4:45, on and off, until I couldn't stand it any longer. I went and got him, put him in bed beside me, and he slept like a log until I woke him up at 9. Maybe, eventually, what people tell me is true. Maybe, if I had the willpower to listen to him cry, he'd eventually exhaust himself and give up and learn to sleep by himself.
The thing is, I'm just not all that invested in letting him cry. Perhaps I'm setting him up for a lifetime of failure and psychological problems by giving in, but it seems so much easier to me to just let him sleep next to me. He's not going to do it forever. In fact, when he's busy keeping a log of all the reasons that he can't stand me, I'll probably miss the days when he couldn't sleep unless he was in my bed. For now, the current system works really well. I put him in his crib around 7. He wakes up between 11 and 12, and cries until I pick him up. this is convenient, since I tend to go to bed around then anyway. I take him to bed, he nurses himself back to sleep, and we both sleep until we get up, around 6. Sometimes he wakes up and nurses himself back to sleep between 11 and 6, but he doesn't really wake me up to do so.
I have been stressing for months about how to end this arrangement. I keep telling myself that I HAVE TO PUT A STOP TO THIS! But the truth is, why monkey with a system that works just fine for everyone? Owen will organically transition himself out of our bed, and I can wait for that. I'm in no hurry to wish his babyhood away, anyhow. There's no guarantee I'll get another baby, and I'm determined to enjoy the one I have. Even if he pees in my bed once in awhile.
No comments:
Post a Comment