I’m struggling big time as I type this out. Energy levels are at an extreme low and my eyes feel like sandpaper. Just went to the bathroom and wondered ‘who the hell is that guy’ when I looked in the mirror. Yes, I am a zombie. The human undead walking the streets in search of something. What is that something again? Ah yes, sleep. The sleep of the dead.
I wrote that on 4 January 2011. The reason I was feeling so damn lousy at the time was that the wife and I had decided the new year would bring in a new regime for our non-sleeping son. It’s been over a month since then and I can now report we have a sleeping son.
It didn’t take a month to happen mind you. Much shorter than that. It’s just taken me a month to contemplate the whole ordeal and put it into words. So here is the next instalment of Man v Toddler. Or Man and Woman V Toddler to be precise.
The beginning then. For a number of reasons – sickness, parental laziness, etc – the son had developed some pretty darn ordinary sleeping habits over the months leading up to D-Day (1 Jan). As a result, he’d developed the bad habit of only settling and falling to sleep if one of us was in the room with him. He’d then also wake nearly every hour or so and stick his head up to see if we were still there.
This failure to self-settle was therefore causing severe sleep shortages for the wife and I. And the only sleep we were getting was on our son’s floor, resulting in sore backs, bruised ribs and extremely weary minds.
This situation was of course not sustainable and following a very disrupted Xmas period, the decision was made that we’d try and change the son’s sleeping patterns and hopefully teach him the holy grail of baby sleeping, self-settling.
A tool that we felt was our responsibility to teach him and one he would have for the rest of his life. Especially given his development needs, but also for our sanity. And 1 January 2011 seemed like as good a night as any. First day of the rest of our lives and all that.
Well, Night 1 was not fun at all. Having always been settled to sleep, the son was not a happy camper about us putting him in his cot awake and leaving the room to allow him to self-settle. We’d decided to follow a set routine recommended by a reputable Children’s Health website and following five visits in just over an hour he finally fell asleep. As per his routine up to then, he again woke a few hours later demanding to be settled back to asleep.
Tired beyond all recognition already, we set out to follow the routine once again but it was horrible. Absolutely horrible. This was all so new to the son and he screamed the house down for what seemed like an eternity as we lay there with no choice but to listen to it all, resulting in plenty of tears from the wife as well.
It lasted one and a half hours in the end with the son finally falling asleep when I last went in and placed him back down on his back. A bit of a fail therefore in trying to get him to self-settle to asleep, but hey, what could I do? I certainly wasn’t going to wake him from it and start it all over again.
Night 2 was a little better as it wasn’t such a fight to get him to asleep at the start of the night. Just short of an hour if memory serves me correctly. He then slept for a long period, despite some noises in his sleep around midnight, before waking at 3am. Pleasantly surprised that it was that late, we then settled in for the ‘crying game’ once more thinking maybe this whole thing will work quite quickly.
Our initial hope then turned to disappointment as the son cried on-off for two hours before dropping off by himself. A small victory in that he’d not required us to be there to fall asleep. But a very small victory in that he probably fell asleep from sheer exhaustion and dehydration (from all the crying) more than anything.
He then managed to sleep for a couple more hours until 6:30am but it was impossible for the wife and I to get back to sleep after all that, so we were pretty much awake from 3am that day.
To be continued….
EDM.
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