this, that and the miracle of sleep

Brr. The chilly days have arrived! Sophia is constantly outside none the less, barefoot but cranking her winter woolies (super cute hat knitted by her great-grandmother).





Our son spends minutes at a time in this position at the moment. He wants to be a Navy SEAL and is getting a head start on the training.





I have been walking around like a zombie for weeks. William's deliciously long night time stints have been a thing of the past for months now. We are talking two hours, total, of broken night time sleep and over twenty wake times. I have been living off cups of tea, fantasizing about curling up on the carpet in the middle of the day, and snapping far too often at my poor little three year old (for which sleep deprivation is no excuse, I know--I have a way to go towards my long term goal of managing my behaviour under any circumstance).

I wish I could feed and cuddle and rock my baby to sleep and have him stay that way all night long. Turns out all that feeding and cuddling and rocking has created a bit of a problem. Surprised? No, just disappointed. ;)





So we finally reached the point this week where we decided to embrace tears (to put it mildly) with a view to change. This would be an easy decision if William was the sort of baby who would cry for 10 minutes and then give up and sleep. Needless to say, he is not.

So, shaking with nerves for what I knew would be a long and heart-wrenching night, I began the Sleep Easy Solution sleep training dvd. Determined to be consistent and see it through properly, as hard as I knew that would be. (We had similar night time issues with Sophia and, after trying what felt like everything else, gave this dvd a go. Sophia very quickly became a consistent 7pm to 7am sleeper.)





I am not going to tell you how hard it was because it disturbs me just to mention it. I will say that we got approval from our doctor first, for peace of mind.

So here it is three days in to the program: William is currently asleep. He slept all night long last night and the night before. He has had two beautiful long day time sleeps today. Time spent rocking/feeding/bouncing/willing him to sleep = 0 minutes. Stress and fatigue levels = significantly decreased. Give us a couple of weeks to perfect it and catch up on missed sleep and I think we'll be doing pretty well.

I wish I could have had the same success with the no cry methods. I did try. But, there it is. We needed to embrace this difficult thing to get to the easy stuff on the other side of it: a happy and well rested baby, mum and family. Much better for William and much better for all of us.





Goodbye sleep deprivation, we won't miss you.


:)


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