So. We tried CIO. The past few nights I have tried to do all my usual tricks to get her to sleep and nothing was working and there was a lot of crying. I figured if she’s going to cry and not sleep for hours at a time while she’s in my arms I might as well try the crib. What really broke me was naps going to hell too. After several days and nights of that I was being a bitch and I found myself getting angry at Kate during the day. That’s not good, not at all. I kept thinking, what the hell am I doing? She’s getting worse and worse, and here my friends babies are sleeping just fine. No I have no illusions that Kate will miraculously sleep through the night, but maybe she would learn to fall asleep on her own, maybe she would just get better and start sleeping. I hear it everywhere, over and over again: you have to let them cry it out for them to learn. Den and I agreed to give it a shot.<\/p>\n
It. Was. Awful. I figured she’d cry\/scream for a while (1 hour of screaming, then 1 and a half hours of tired whimpering as she dozed off presumably sitting up, then woke up crying again), but then she’d fall asleep. What I did not foresee was her waking back up an hour later, screaming more, and so on throughout the night. Awful doesn’t even begin to describe it. I wanted to climb out of my skin. I did cry, a lot. We didn’t want to give up, we wanted to stick it out and see if it would work.<\/p>\n
But. I layed there thinking, again, “What the hell am I doing?” It felt so wrong<\/i>. I have parenting this child by instinct from the start, always doing what I felt<\/i> was right. I have read her cues, I have listened to her, I have followed my heart. And this went against all<\/i> of it. It didn’t feel like I was teaching<\/i> her, it felt like I was punishing<\/i> her. All I kept thinking was, what is she thinking right now? She’s confused, she’s beyond tired, she’s upset, she’s scared. She doesn’t know why mommy isn’t here. And the thing is, I have slept with her for 10 months. That’s not her fault she needs me.<\/p>\n
I didn’t make a decision in the dark of night while she cried. But when I got up in the morning and felt as terrible as I did at 3am, and when I thought and thought about it for hours, then I made a decision. It is not important enough to me to do this. Even if she does end up getting used to it and sleeping in her crib, I don’t think I can be okay with myself for making that decision. It’s not right for me.<\/p>\n
We are going to continue to make changes and work on her sleep, but we’re going to do it my way – for good or ill. Maybe I’ll screw it up, maybe in 3 months I’ll wish I had done something different. But unfortunately all I have is the here and now so this is what I’m going with.<\/p>\n
We did put the crib in her room and I’ve decided to continue to use it. Kate has gotten to the point where when I lay down with her she doesn’t want to be forced to lay down and she’s constantly climbing on me and trying to walk off. It’s not a safety thing – her room is baby safe and the mattress is directly on the floor – but when she can wander off and pull things off shelves and play with her diapers and climb on me and on and off the mattress it really doesn’t matter how long I wait, she does not sleep. Plus the getting climbed on and smacked in the head gets really old at midnight. If I try pinning her down to sleep that doesn’t teach her anything and it makes her wicked pissed. So. With her in the crib she gets to move around – within reason. She has a few quiet toys in there (a mirror, a taggies blanket, a stuffed animal, a crib piano). The futon mattress is right in front of the crib. So we’re going to use the crib, but I’m going to be laying right beside her.<\/p>\n
Nap #1 today I tried to comfort her without letting her hold my hand. When she’d lay down on my hand I’d remove it, and she’d just start crying all over again. I ended up having to take her for a long stroller walk to get her to sleep, I didn’t want to keep trying and failing. Naps are so hard – if she doesn’t get one then I know bedtime will be that much harder. Nap #2 I let her put her head on my hand. It did take her half an hour of walking around her crib playing with toys and a little bit of confused crying, but she finally layed herself down and fell asleep. Yes this still uses me as a lovie, we’ll work on that, but it accomplishes two very important things: she layed herself<\/i> down, and she’s sleeping in the crib. That’s pretty major for us here. And I actually think it was less stressful than the days when I have literally wrestled her down to force her to sleep.<\/p>\n
We’ll see how tonight goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So. We tried CIO. The past few nights I have tried to do all my usual tricks to get her to sleep and nothing was working and there was a lot of crying. I figured if she’s going to cry and not sleep for hours at a time while she’s in my arms I might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3561"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3562,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3561\/revisions\/3562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}