MOM-ents: To Sleep No More

“People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.” - Leo J. Burke

I LOVE sleeping.  Especially now that I have two children and sleep is a hot commodity in our house.  In fact, I don’t trust people that say that they only need four or five hours of sleep a night, unless they have a thyroid issue.

When an activity that we are doing goes past 9:00 (8:00) p.m., my mind is constantly running down the odds of how much sleep I will get that night and what the quality of that sleep will be.  Also, whatever we are doing needs to be way more rewarding than sleeping, and these days not many things are. 

That being said, the last week in our house has been tough.  Matthew has rarely slept through the night (to my knowledge.) When I was still nursing him at night this was not an issue because we were co-sleeping and I would barely wake up to feed him. It was just a matter of scooting him over and latching him on (too much information, I know.) So when people would inevitably ask if he was sleeping through the night I would always respond “I don’t know if he is, but I am!”

As we tried to move him into the crib we would rush when he cried so that he would not wake his sister up.  Little did we know that it would probably take a train running directly through our house to do that. She sleeps better than anyone in the house, probably because she has about 75% of a king-size bed to herself while hubby and I split the other 25%.

This last week Matthew has been awake from like 2:00 in the morning to roughly 3:30–and I mean WIDE-awake and mostly crying.  Any mother knows that the sounds of their baby’s cry can bring on a very primal instinct to get that crying to stop–it is the worst sound in the world.  So I tried everything: feeding him, trying to rock him, etc. while resisting the urge to jump out of our bedroom window.  One night I just said, “Fine, you want to be up?” and turned on the lights so that we could play with his toys.  I really showed him as he took two long naps the next day while I drank my weight in coffee trying to make it through work (that will teach him!)

So I am going to sacrifice the next few nights of sleep by figuring out how to get Matthew to go back to sleep on his own.  Any suggestions are welcome and I am looking forward to the Friday evening when I can enjoy a cocktail with my hubby without trying to balance a highball on my baby’s bottom as I hold him.  Cheers!