Sleep, Baby, Sleep

I'm trying to get Marcus sleeping through the night. I skimmed through The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley that I read when Ethan was this age, to get some ideas to help. I'm trying to get Marcus's nap schedule back on track to help him sleep through the night. It's really hard to drop what I'm doing to get him down for his naps, but sacrificing those ten to fifteen minutes is worth it, because having him taking naps again is great.

I've been concentrating less on dishes and cleaning the past few days, and I'm not doing any projects this week (even though the nursery is screaming Paint me!) so I can just focus on getting Marcus to sleep better.

If you'll allow me to stand on a soap box for a minute, I'll go ahead and tell you that I don't believe in crying-it-out. I don't believe that it's good for the baby, or for the parents. A lot of advocates of the cry-it-out method say that a baby needs to learn to go to sleep by themselves, so they'll go back to sleep when they wake up at night. But I believe that it is the parents' job to teach the baby to go to sleep by themselves, which is what I feel the book The No-Cry Sleep Solution helps you do. With all three kids sleeping in one room, Alyssa has watched me rock Marcus and lay him down, then rock him again and lay him down, over and over again while trying to get him to sleep, and one night she said that she was mad at Marcus because he wasn't letting me go to bed. I told her that I wasn't mad at Marcus, because babies need to be loved to sleep so they can know that they'll be taken care of and they can feel safe. I told her that we just needed to be patient with Marcus and teach him how to go to sleep. I admit, I haven't been patient all the time. There has been a few times when I've been tired while getting the kids to bed (Remember? I'm a morning person.) and I'll rock Marcus and say, "Just - please - go - to - SLEEP!" while gritting my teeth. (And there have been a few times when I've had to put him down to cry for a few minutes so I could regroup to try again.) It hasn't been easy all of the time, but he has definitely made progress. He's gone from sleeping most of the night in my bed, to actually preferring to sleep in his crib. He's still waking up as frequently as when we started, but he's going back to sleep easier and quicker, and he is sleeping better.

Stepping down from the soap box: Even though I don't like to let my babies cry, I realize that every baby and every parent is different, and if you agree with the cry-it-out approach, that is totally fine, and I'm not sitting here thinking that you're a bad parent for that. I've heard of babies that actually do sleep through the night after crying a few times, and I know that rocking your baby to sleep doesn't work for every parent, or even every baby. All I'm saying, is this is the way I've chosen to do it. That's all.

So here's to sleep, and how wonderful it feels when we get enough of it.