When the twins are having sleep issues, it just really sucks. I can’t complain most of the time, since they do really well overall. People who have stayed with us sometimes seem really surprised that once the boys are down for the night at 8:00 or so, they’re down until the next morning, no matter how much of a ruckus we make down here. (Not that we usually make much of a ruckus.) They sleep really well and I like having my down time in the evenings—I don’t know what I would do without that.
We’ve recently been enabling Primo a bit, though. He was sick, and we were on vacation in a strange place. ‘Nuff said. He started waking up between 2:00-4:00 a.m., and we started bringing him into bed with us. Two weeks later, he’s still doing it almost every night, and I knew this would happen. The thing is, I also knew breaking him of the habit would take a little work, and who wants to deal with that at 2:00 a.m.? Taking him to bed in the guest room is just easier. (As an aside, here’s the one thing I didn’t know about parenting that became obvious to me once the boys were born: All of the things I thought I would or would not do kind of flew out the window and I made a lot of decisions based on whatever would let me get a little MORE SLEEP. If I’d known that, I could have saved a lot of the time I spent reading baby books while I was pregnant.)
In the end, I stayed up past 3:00 this morning. Two good things came of it. Although I could have done some work on my translations today, I really, really wanted to be done, and I did finish my work. Also, when Primo woke up at two, I was wide awake and able to deal with him. I staged a little intervention of sorts. Every time he cried, I went back in there and settled him down. I must have gone in ten or fifteen times. Sometimes I just patted his back and he would go back to sucking his fingers and would curl right back into his sleeping position. Sometimes he would throw his lovey out of the crib and I would just give it back to him without making a fuss. I would explain to him that everyone was sleeping and that he needed to sleep, too. Sometimes my tone was soothing, sometimes it was a lot firmer.
In the end, he stayed down. I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself, though we’ll see what happens tonight.
1 comment:
Good God, something is in the air. Riley slept with me last night, starting at about 11:00. At 2:30, though--tired of getting punched and kicked by a restless boy--I put him back in his own bed. By that point, he was so thoroughly sound asleep, that he made but a weak cry and stayed there until 7:15am. Thank the good lord. He's been having sleep trouble since we left for Oregon, plus he has a little cold . . . we'll see what tonight brings.
Anyway, this is YOUR blog and I'm talking about ME. What I want to say here is good job on soothing Primo. You are so right that unless you happen to be awake at 2:00am, it's a tough road to soothe them back down. But look at you! You got your work done and you tamed the beast (at least for one night).
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