Sleepless Nights

Just thought I'd share a chuckle. This time you get to laugh at Rob and I as parents.

We have been swaddling Meredith since she was born to try and get her to sleep. It seems she has really needed it. We even found larger sized muslin blankets to wrap her up in because she's so huge and was busting out of the other ones we had. We went a step farther and started wrapping her in TWO blankets to try and keep her arms locked down. It seemed to us that she'd wake up at night because her arms would get out. It worked great up until about 2 months ago.

Well, she is 8 months old. I decided we just needed to suck it up and let her scream it out and let her get used to comforting herself and putting herself back to sleep. We did it with our first three and it only took about 2 nights with each child before they were completely sleeping through the night. I also did it when they were much younger. Being super busy with 5 kids and dead tired all the time I have not wanted to deal with even one night of letting her learn so I've put it off and put it off. Unfortunately we are to the point where she wakes up several times a night anyway and we aren't sleeping at all so what's a few more nights of no sleeping?

Friday night we decided we were going to do it. We weren't going to wrap her up.We were just going to lay her down and let her scream it out. I fed her, it didn't bode well that she stayed awake through the whole feeding, she usually never does. We left her unwrapped and laid her down awake in her bed. I hunkered down with a new game on my Kindle and waited for the screaming to commence. She babbled a bit, Rob fell asleep but I stayed up playing my game convinced she would start screaming any minute. Next thing I knew it was 11 pm, Rob was still out and I realized that it had been over an hour since I'd heard her babbling. Seriously? There was no way she fell alseep on her own without screaming. Rob woke up as I was finishing up getting ready for bed and I had him go check on her to make sure she was really ok. She had rolled herself over and fallen asleep, just like that. Wow. I didn't get my hopes up though as her habit has been to wake up in the middle of the night and then doesn't want to go back to sleep. Next thing I knew the alarm was going off at 6 am and both of us realized she never woke up!! I can't tell you how wonderful it felt to have slept ALL night for the first time in a long time. I acually wasn't dying by 1 pm yesterday and feeling like I needed a 4 hour nap.

Yesterday rolled on by and soon it was time to put her down again. I was sure Friday night was a fluke. I got myself all geared up again for a bed time full of screaming. This time she did fall asleep when I fed her and Rob laid her down, unwrapped, in her bed and walked away. She did wake up at one point, we heard her about 2 am, but I held Rob back and said we'd let her scream and see what happened. Darned if she didn't cry for about 10 secs and then go right back to sleep!! Again the alarm woke us up at six and neither of us had lost any real sleep to a crying baby.

Really? Just like that that? No screaming, no crying, no frustration? All this time we could have been laying her down, unwrapped, and she would have been sleeping through the night? Arrrggh!! I'm beggining to wonder if her waking up was BECAUSE of the swaddling. If all she wanted was to just be able to roll over in her sleep. Geeze.

So here Rob and I had ourselves all geared up and ready for a fight and all for nothing. Really makes me wonder how many of our sleepless nights didn't have to be that way.

Here's to hoping this will continue. Being who I am I am not totally convinced it will continue but fingers are crossed and I'll just take any night I can get that we aren't woken up!!