Letting go

There was a time (B's entire life up until a few days ago) when I was obsessed with figuring out the magic sleep bullet. I figured there had to be a trick, or at least a complex combination of tricks, that would make it all better and turn my baby into the sleeping angel that I feel I should have birthed.

So many times I have discovered a new approach from one of my myriad sleep books, or switched something up with some success, and I clung so tightly to that newest meaningless change. I was just desperate for it to keep working. At first it was the tummy discovery. Once I put him down on his stomach, he went from sleeping for 30 mins without being held to sleeping for 2 hours without being held. This only worked at night but still worthy of a 'Hallelujah'! (Ok, this one I think actually had some merit.) Next it was the white noise. Aha! He sleeps so much better with white noise because he isn't disturbed by any extraneous noises. As a result of this discovery I own four different white noise machines.*

*I am willing to part with one of them though. Let me know if you want a worthless Sleep Sheep that automatically shuts off after an allotted time at which point your baby will wake up from the sudden lack of noise.

Free to a good home. Yes it is designed to be strung up by its neck- another of this product's shortcomings.

Eventually we instituted the bedtime routine. I needed to signal to B that it was time to sleep for an extended period and not just his usual 30 min nap. We read bedtime stories, put on a nighttime diaper, use a little lotion, sing a lullaby, etc. All the books swear by this one and therefore I convinced myself that it too was helping.

Then we started binky rehab. No more sucking to sleep! In fact he doesn't seem to be addicted to the binky as much as I thought he was, although he is addicted to his Wubbanub, Marcus the monkey (topic of another post to come).

"What? I can quit at any time. I just don't WANT to."

So if all of my tricks seem, at least to me, to be working then what made me give up? I don't know really. Probably it was mostly time and just a general loss of fight. Like a Ferberized baby, I've stopped crying and fallen asleep. There was one recent realization, however, that precipitated my final capitulation to my bad sleeper. I had this idea in my head that if I was doing all of these magical things and he was still sleeping poorly then dear god what if I stopped doing all of these things? Imagine the horror. Surely he'd be up all night screaming and thrashing.

When we stayed at my brother and sister-in-law's house this past weekend, all of our sleeping routine and tricks went out the window. He slept in a new strange place, in a room full of people, in not complete darkness, with no bedtime routine. I wasn't diligent about putting him down drowsy but awake and I pretty much gave in with the binky or nursing or whatever would make him go back to sleep and not wake up the other four people in the house. And you know what? He slept exactly the same as he did with all of my hexes and incantations. He even had one night where he slept straight through a 7 hour stretch.

Napping with Marcus. The newest member of our family, Marcus II, is ready should some horrible fate befall Marcus I.

I think that unless I do things that I am not willing to do, B is just going to sleep the way he sleeps. This feels like maybe it's one of those momentous parenting lessons here. I'm learning to accept my kid the way he is or at least learning to accept that I did something to him to make him this way but I don't know how or am unwilling to do whatever would fix change it.

Hopefully my new found acceptance truly comes from a place of wisdom and letting go and not just from laziness so that I can carry this new parenting philosophy with me as he grows. Will I be so calm and accepting if he comes home one day and tells me he's a Republican? Or will I first bring out all my old white noise machines in hopes of drowning out the sound of Rush Limbaugh's voice in his head?

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