I Thought I knew

The theme for this year should be sleep. When I don't have enough of it I cannot function well and feel mildly depressed. I knew that having children means that you get less sleep. I had no idea how little sleep it could be until the children arrived. Hannah slept poorly until we sleep trained her when she was over nine months old. It was terrible. I couldn't sleep or eat or barely keep anything in me during the worst two weeks of my life. Now we are sleep training Noah. He is much, much younger. Four months old. Our pediatrician said we could do it when he was two months old, but I didn't feel comfortable with it because I felt like I couldn't read Noah's cues. Is he crying because he has to poop? Is he tired or hungry? I have no idea. Well now he is more regular with his poops. I can tell when He's tired and he started to sleep really terribly. So instead of letting bad sleep habits arise I convinced Robert that we needed to sleep train him now and not when he's six months old like we had originally talked about.

There has been lots and lots of crying. The worst of it was two hours the first day. The least of it has been one minute. There has been in instance with no crying. I was wearing him in his baby Ergo and he was getting cranky, so as I was preparing lunch, I bounced him. He got all sleepy so I put him down in his crib on his tummy (no time to swaddle) and he slept for forty-five minutes! No crying! I thought that was great. It didn't last.

I don't like swaddling him I feel that she should be able to move freely if he'd like to. If we swaddle him while he's sleeping, he's swaddled for more than 15 hours a day. I just don't think it's good for his joints and limbs. We were going to continue it, but then he fell asleep unexpectedly on me so instead of waking him up and swaddling him, I just put him down on his tummy. And he slept! Am I worried about SIDS. Yes I am. Any mom who doesn't worry is a fool! But I'm not so sure that SIDS doesn't correspond with vaccinating your children or with the baby's mattress off-gassing chemicals. We invested in a mattress cover from New Zeland to contain any gasses and have a monitor with a special plate that goes under the mattress and ticks to let us know that the baby is breathing/moving and sounds and alarm to indicate movement has stopped for over 15 seconds. The alarm has only gone off once when we used this monitor with Hannah. It happend only when she would ball up in the corner of the crib. So we know it works!

Crying is terrible. Crying and silence and then crying again is torture! Purt torture. I really thought this time would be easier after the first couple of days. But it's not easy at all. I just want Noah to learn to sleep on his own and go back to sleep when he's still tired. That's all I ask. That's all I want. No more crying please.