yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It's been awhile. Frankly, my blogging has succumbed to faraway friend syndrome. You know how it goes - you have a close friend you don't see often. You try and talk regularly, maybe once or twice a month. But then things get busy and a couple months go by, and you keep thinking to yourself "oh, I have just GOT to call so and so". But then you realize you only have about 10 minutes, and that's not nearly enough time to catch up, so you put it off until you have "enough time". Then they call you, but you're just about to run in to an appointment, and you really want to chat for an hour but will have to get off the phone in in five minutes, so you send the call to voicemail....before you know it, you haven't talked to your friend in a year.
It's kind of like that. So, I've decided to just pickup where we are now, and if months 2 and 3 of Eli's life are lost to posterity, so be it.
Anyway, today Owen and I went to Children's Hospital for our appointment with Dr. Ferber. It's not every day you meet a world renowned child-rearing expert who's last name has turned into a verb in common parlance, so I figured it was worth blogging about. We certainly didn't leave with a silver bullet for Owen's sleep problems - it was more of an intake than anything else. Turns out working with Dr. Ferber is more of a process than one stop shopping. In retrospect, I should have realized this - what did I think he was going to do, give me a sleeping potion?
Before I go on, I have to tell this little Dr. Ferber story. A friend of a friend of mine works at Children's. She signed up for the same post-pregnancy core strengthening class as I am taking, and last Monday after class I mentioned we had this appointment with Ferber. She told me that one time, she was at an all-hospital event of some sort, and she was seated next to Dr. Ferber. When she realized who he was, she started talking immediately about her 6 month old, his sleep habits, what they had already tried, etc. She said that Dr. Ferber turned to her with a tired, bored look and said "Really, I don't...." he did not finish the sentence but apparently it was quite clear that the final word in that sentence was "care." And he referred her to his book.
So, yeah. Our appointment was a bit like that.
On the one hand, I see where he's coming from. He didn't say anything that isn't clearly deliniated in his book, which I have in fact read cover-to-cover twice and consult on an as-needed basis often. He probably spends 90% of his time telling parents with exactly the same problem the exact same things for the past 20 years. And by the same problem, I mean, they didn't read his book. He probably IS pretty bored. He's a board-certified pediatric neurologist, and his main function is telling parents to put their kids to bed later and stop giving them a drink of water if they wake up overnight.
On the other, being as we have read his book, and have been implementing the techniques faithfully for the better part of a year, I was a little disappointed. His message to me was that we just weren't following the directions in the book closely enough, because if we were, Owen wouldn't still be having sleep problems. Well, maybe. It's true, he did identify some small areas in which we were being inconsistent, and he did show me a pretty interesting chart explaining the amount of total sleep a child of a given age needs in a 24 hour period. But still, I think Owen's sleep problems are pretty resistant.
Ultimately, Dr. Ferber gave us a chart to record every minute of sleep/awake time Owen had for the next six weeks along with directions to keep a sleep log/journal about what we did, what he did, and how he slept. We're to go back at the end of June and he'll look at the charts, assess the situation, and I guess we'll go from there.
In the meantime, he suggests a bedtime for my 2 year old of 10pm. This seems wild and crazy to me, but he claims that most people wildly overestimate the amount of sleep children need and a 10pm bedtime is perfectly normal. Given that about 90% of my friends with kids are putting them to bed by 8 at the latest, this seems a bit suspect to me, but I guess Dr. Ferber would know.
After all, he did, well, write the book.
1 comment:
As the mother of Owen's kindred spirit, I can assure you that we never put Mikie to bed at 8pm until he was in preschool. Up until age 2, Mikie's bedtime was 11pm. He would wake up around 5:30-6am. Once he started preschool with no naps during the day, we gradually moved up bedtime. We now start bedtime around 8pm, but he doesn't go to sleep until 9pm.
My aunt would let my twin cousins stay up until they fell asleep on their own. Then she would carry them into their cribs. . . between 10 and 11pm. So, until Hannah was born, I thought Mikie was normal and all our friends children were aliens. What child goes to bed at 8pm and sleeps through the night? Not any baby I had ever met. . .
Just like your child will eventually eat if they are hungry enough, they should sleep if they're tired enough. So, go get a little trampoline at Walmart, set it up in your living room, and make that kid bounce until he can't bounce anymore!
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