Ode To The Nap

I feel like writing a sonnet to the toddler nap, in the hopes that it will stick around a bit longer.  Very, very sadly, it seems to be on its way out.  I would say Owen naps maybe 4 days a week, but that estimate could be generous.  He just truly seems to not be tired often, and unless the sleep overtakes him, he doesn’t relax enough to nap.

Sean is the nap king: he’ll go up to Owen’s room and hold him while sitting in the chair, and forbid him to talk or wiggle, and more times than not Owen will then fall asleep.  Susan and I can’t really make this happen.  The frustrating thing is that on the weekend I’ll try to get him to sleep and have no luck, and so Sean will go up and get him snoozing, and then Owen will sleep for two hours!  So clearly there is some need for sleep; it just is hard to unlock.

I can sometimes get him to nap on Saturdays after he gets tired out at his swim lesson…but sometimes not.

And what makes me think the nap is departing for good is that Owen really isn’t cranky on the days when he doesn’t nap.  He’ll get a little manic by the end of the day and have some impulse control issues (knocking over glasses of water is a favorite, for example), but he’s not really temper trantrum-y like he used to be on nap-less days.

We’ve tried, too, the “quiet time” version of naptime, but I really can’t understand how people make this work.  Owen will happily scream “Mommy!  I’m awake!” at full throttle for a whole hour.  I’ve tried putting books in his crib, but he throws them out.

I'm too busy to nap.

When he does nap, though, it is still so wondrous!  He gets up about 5:30, so after playing with him from 5:30 to 1:00, it is so lovely to be just me on the couch with some books and some coffee.  Alas!  It was the best of times!  O nap! – we hardly knew ye!

Snore

I am aware that sleep issues are as boring for you to read about as they are wretched for us to experience, so I don’t plan to go into great detail here.  But first of all I’d like to say that the powers that be need to do a better job of letting people know that there is a good chance they won’t sleep much for a good two or so years after first becoming parents.  I mean, I certainly knew that I wouldn’t get much sleep the first few months of Owen’s life.  And I also knew that it was possible I’d get a bad sleeper and have recurring sleep problems.  But I’m pretty sure that no one told me that once my child was allegedly “sleeping through the night,” he would only be doing so for about four days out of seven, say.  And that those wouldn’t be consecutive days:  there seems to always be something disrupting Owen’s sleep.

I just think a heads up would have been helpful.  Although come to think of it, my sister’s third child was a bad sleeper, and I remember Martha complaining about it to me on the phone, so it is probably just one of those things that unless and until you experience it, you don’t comprehend its agony.  (And I also don’t remember being warned about what the sound of the crying of your child waking up in the middle of the night does to your nerves and your emotions, and hey, even your bowels.  And that after a sleepless night, I can hear the sound of Owen crying in the hum of the air conditioner at work, and it gives me a jolt.  Or am I sounding too crazy now?!...)

At any rate, to be concise, Owen had been sleeping quite well (and again, by “well” I mean, let’s say, 3 or 4 nights of the week).  Then he got a cold and then there was a two-week or so interval at the end of which we realized that he had completely un-sleep trained us, or rather, he had trained us to again jump up and run to him at every twitch, and then not leave until he was deep in a REM sleep, and that this was hell for all in the family who are not Owen.  So we had to re-do the sleep training, and for the most part let him cry it out, which we did by Sean going into the sunroom and putting on headphones, and me downstairs watching the Good Wife on dvd and timing his crying with crazy-eyed glancing at the clock.

Then all was well for a week until last Friday Owen caught another cold, which led to Monday night’s non-sleep of about two non-consecutive hours for me and Sean.  To throw us off our game – as sleep terrorists like Owen are wont to do – he then slept beautifully last night and didn’t wake up once.  (I got eight hours of sleep people!  That’s the holy grail of sleep!!)

Who knows what will happen tonight?  Which is part of what makes it difficult for me.  If someone could tell me:  you will sleep from 10-12, then be dealing with a fussy Owen from 12-1:30, then sleep for another two hours, etc., I’d be much more relaxed about the whole thing.  For some reason it is the unknown element that makes it wretched, since I tend to be a pessimist in the wee small hours of the morning and will convince myself that neither Owen nor I will ever sleep again. 

So wish us luck.  Or wish me to stop talking about this – take your pick.  J

Owen looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 

no matter how wretched the night:

 

Sleep, Redux

I don’t want to jinx anything by writing it down, but since the beginning of January, sleep habits have really changed for the better at Bulldogge Manor.  Mostly.  As I think I mentioned here before, Sean and I attended a sleep training class at our local Breastfeeding Resource Center, and it was both informative and interesting.  The class was on Tuesday the 7th, and the teacher recommended that sleep training start on a Thursday (basically so that you are tired on a Friday, but then are hopefully nearing the end by the following Monday), and since we wanted to get our sleep training plan hashed out, we waited until the 16^th to begin.  Well either Owen knew something was up, or we happened to catch him right at the time he was ready to sleep better anyway, because in the nine days in between the class and when the training officially started, Owen basically sleep trained himself.

He stopped wanting to be in our bed, and after each nursing session would want to get back in his crib.  He also woke up less in general, too.  So on the first day of sleep training he woke up and cried from 10:45 – 12:15, with us going in as we were supposed to, first every 5, then 10, then 15 then 20 minutes and doing nothing but giving him an empathetic pat on the back and some kind words (which enraged him).  Then at 12:15 he went to sleep and slept until 5:30.  He then proceeded to basically sleep from 7:15 – 5:15 every day since.

We have had a few interruptions—once caused by the cold he had, and then the second time by our loss of electricity and ensuing freezing night plus a night in a hotel – but in general he always seems happy to return to sleeping in his own crib.  Every once in a while he’ll awake at 3, say, and cry, and one of us will go in and pick him up and give him some comfort, and after a few minutes he will dive back into the crib.  So at the moment, dare I say, his sleep is good.

Of course, it would be nice if he could sleep into the sixes instead of the fives, especially when he wakes up at 5:05.  But still!  After 18 months of waking up every two hours with him, and then the last six months of having at least once per night of him being up for an hour not being able to fall back asleep, this seems like a luxury.  I’m basically sleeping 7 hours in a row!  It is quite divine.

At the moment Owen is going through a short nap phase of only 45 minutes or so.  But really, who cares?!  He is sleeping well through the night.

I’m wondering though if one can sleep train a bulldogge.  Now that Owen is gone from my side of the bed, Dorothy has joined me there and when she sleeps, she is definitely a Velcro dog to the extreme.  I will often wake up and not be sure which limbs are mine and which are Dorothy’s, and really, there IS such a thing as too much togetherness.  Not to mention her loud snoring.

Dorothy thinking, I finally got my place back.

To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

Having had no uninterrupted sleep since August of 2012, Sean and I took a sleep training class last week at our nearby Breastfeeding Resource Center.  The woman who taught the class was great—her presentation was a really interesting mix of science and experience and anecdote, and she also specifically addressed the situation of all 8 attendees.

So tomorrow we begin sleep training with Owen, which I dread, despite feeling rather optimistic about the results.  As if aware that his nights as a co-sleeper – or as Sean would put it, a “sleep terrorist” – are numbered, Owen has been making all sorts of leaps and bounds in the past seven days.  Most importantly, I’ve put him back in his crib the last few nights after nursing, instead of letting him flail and punch and head-butt me in my bed, and each time he has basically gone right down with nary a peep.  He still wakes up every few hours for the most part, although five nights or so ago he slept from 7:30 to 4:30 in a stretch—which is the longest he has slept ever.  So I think what it comes down to is that (knock on wood) we are beginning sleep training at a really good window in Owen’s sleep development, such as it is.  I think he now prefers the crib, so we really will “just” have to break him of the habit of getting up to nurse multiple times during the night, and also of having us be how he gets himself back to sleep.

On Thursday we begin letting him cry for five, then ten, then fifteen, then twenty minutes at a stretch.  When we go in to offer him comfort, we will not pick him up.  This will be the hard part for me, as well as the not nursing.  The other difficult part will be that since he more or less sleeps happily and well from 7:30 to between 12 and 2, we will basically be beginning the sleep training in the wee small hours of the night.  Urgh.

For most kids it takes seven days, although I’m told the average is two weeks.  Owen is definitely a stubborn little guy, but I still feel strangely hopeful that it is going to work.  In the meantime, if you see Sean and me walking around like zombies for the next week, it is because our sleep is temporarily becoming even more fragmented.

On the nap front, Owen has all of a sudden been extending his usual one hour and twenty minute nap to much longer.  On Saturday, we even had to postpone a trip to the aquarium because Owen took a three and a half hour nap instead!  We just couldn’t bring ourselves to wake him up, although finally did so at the end.  To summarize:  Sleep!  Baby!  OMG!  WTF?!  ZZZZZZZ.

Owen explaining to Plum why it is fun to wake up in the night.