I just got the latest issue of Parents magazine in the mail yesterday. I like Parents. It's always got good recipes, suggests awesome gear, and keeps me up to date on parenting trends and ideas I would have totally missed out on since I've spent my entire adult life stuck in various corners of backward hell thanks to Uncle Sam. Anyhow, this month's issue did not have a new whole wheat cupcake recipe for me (although there is a beef and broccoli recipe I'm dying to try!), and didn't tell me about the latest and greatest in mommy-and-me classes. It didn't reassure me that circumcision rates truly are falling, or that homeschooling is becoming more popular, or extol the virtues of whole wheat pasta and organic brown rice from California. (Hey, who doesn't like to have their way of doing things justified in a national publication?!)
No, this month's issue had something far more important for me, a 4-page-long article about sleep training in toddlers. We've had sleep issues with Orren... I guess. The thing is, for me, this sleep thing is so arbitrary. I know tons of people who never get a full night's sleep even if their kids are in preschool, because their kids just insist on getting up at night. Then on the other hand, we have Orren's pediatrician, who told us that by 6 months, night wakings were totally unnecessary. He's a good doctor, but we don't agree with him on EVERYTHING, so we didn't take his suggestion of weaning Orren off his night feedings that early. We let Orren continue with his night feedings (only one feeding per night) until he was about 10 months old. Then we started trying to get him off of it. We'd go in, change his diaper, give him hugs and kisses, and put him back down, at which point, he'd scream. The length of time he'd scream varied, but he always screamed. After a couple weeks, we'd occasionally give him a night feeding. A bad parenting move, to be sure, but after a while, it becomes easier and easier to take the easy wrong over the hard right when taking the easy wrong will get you a few hours of peaceful sleep.
Long story slightly shorter, Orren still wakes up once a night. He no longer gets a bottle, and is usually content to just get changed, rocked for a maximum of five minutes (usually closer to two) and be put back down. He'll be 13 months on Monday. According to the article in Parents, sleep training should begin much earlier than this, at maybe 4 months. My first reaction was a sinking feeling... we had missed the boat. We were destined to become those parents whose kids keep them up all night all the way until elementary school. Shit. How could I, an experienced parent (hell, a former SINGLE parent who got married only to continue raising the kids alone due to deployments and insane work schedules!) drop the ball this hard?? If I were an NFL player, I'd have ten flags thrown at me for unsportsmanlike conduct for dropping- nay, spiking- the ball that hard! My heart sunk. I committed the biggest parenting screw-up ever, the thing I have disrespected countless moms for. I had overindulged my child, and created a crappy sleeper. Visions of our on-post neighbors' 2-year-olds dancing on the porch at midnight flashed through my head. Tell me I haven't set us up for THAT. In addition to being tiring, talk about embarrassing. Nobody wants to be *that* parent, least of all a somewhat obsessive perfectionist such as myself.
Then I read further. The sleep training they referred to was getting the baby to fall asleep on their own, being able to put them down awake, and have them go to sleep. OK, he's been doing that for the past seven months.
They recommended giving the last feeding of the evening at the beginning of the bedtime routine. OK, we can check that one off, too. We give him his milk, then read him a story, then brush his teeth, and then he goes to bed. OK, well, I guess it's in the MIDDLE of his bedtime routine, because before that, he gets a bath, then gets dressed for bed, but I think the point was not to have it at the end of the bedtime routine, so I think we're doing ok.
They recommend a 7 pm bedtime, and that the baby sleeps from 7-7. 7 pm is, in fact, Orren's bedtime, and he usually wakes up at 7 something. We're right on target there.
They emphasize the importance of a routine. Well, ever since Thak's 2nd tour in Iraq, when I was alone in Georgia with Erin, who wasn't much older then than Orren is now, I've known the importance of a routine, especially for people like us, whose lifestyle is unstable by its very nature. I've had Orren on a schedule for as long as I can recall. We're good on that.
The conclusion I draw from this is that we're actually doing fine. Sure, we could always revisit the Ferber method, if we chose to, but I think there are greater evils in the world than having to go into Orren's room most nights (he probably does this 4-5 nights a week), and rock him for a couple minutes.
All this got me thinking about everything else that he's doing. He's such a big boy. He's down to only one bottle a day. Otherwise, he's on sippy cups only. He still gets his bottle at bedtime (as part of the routine explained above) and we'll probably do away with that next week. Since we just took his day bottles from him a few days ago, we want to give him a little time to get used to that before we take away his bed time bottle, too. Probably on Monday, his 13 month birthday, we'll go ahead and just give him a cup of milk to drink while we read his books, and then skip the bottle. Once we do that, we can pack all the bottles away, because we won't need them anymore for him!! (And we hopefully won't use them for the next one either. I guess we'll see if the 3rd try is the charm for breastfeeding! I'm keeping the bottles as a matter of superstition, though. If we get rid of them, we'll end up needing them.) So we're about 80% done with bottles right now, and will be 100% by next week. We're ahead of schedule compared to last time. Erin was 18 months before we got her off the bottle completely. Orren will be 13 months to the day.
He also decided he wanted nothing to do with his pacifier anymore when he was about 8 months old, so that takes another big battle off our to-do list. Taking Erin's paci was not easy. She was a very sucky baby, and due to instability in our lives (moving, for one thing) we let her keep her paci until she was 16 months, at which point, Thak had had enough, and took it away from her. For about two days, it was hard, but after that, she forgot all about it. Even though we didn't have to go through some terrible ordeal with Erin, I'm glad we will avoid it entirely with Orren.
I see so clearly now that things balance out with these kids. Erin was a really easy baby. Orren was still easy, but definitely much fussier and more demanding than Erin. It's becoming really apparent, though, that Orren is going to be a pretty easy toddler, whereas Erin clung to all her baby things for dear life. It all balances out in the end.
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