Mar
9
Dylan has never slept through the night, but for quite a while he was only waking up once and I found that to be totally survivable. Not pleasant, exactly, since having someone jolt me out of a drooling coma at 2 AM is never my idea of a good time, but it wasn’t garment-rendingly horrible either. I got so I was basically dealing with him on autopilot: at the first few cries my legs would swing out from under the covers on their own and I’d be down the hall with bottle in hand before my eyelids even cranked to half-mast.
In retrospect it seems this wasn’t maybe the best strategy in the entire world, if the goal was for everyone to eventually sleep through the night unaided. With the exception of a few horrible nights when I tried to let him cry it out but eventually caved, I’ve apparently been doing my level best to teach this child that room service is available 24/7, no matter how many times he presses the call button.
I thought the situation would get better over time, but it’s just gotten worse. He now wakes up an average of 2-3 times per night, and that difference seems to represent the proverbial straw on the camel’s back for me. It’s not just that it’s annoying, or tiring, the real problem now is that it’s making me angry and resentful. When he first starts complaining, I lie there for a few minutes just feeling this overwhelming sensation of GODDAMN IT TO HELL, KID, before trudging in his room and making irritable shh! shh! shh! sounds at him. Once I pick him up and we’re settled in the rocking chair, I find myself calming down almost immediately, and the ritual of rocking him back to sleep — his body burrowed against mine — is soothing and pleasurable and part of me really enjoys it. I just don’t enjoy it enough to do it at 11 PM, 2 AM, and 5 AM, you know?
I’m also having a really hard time waking up in the morning. JB usually gets up before I do and dresses the boys and starts Riley’s breakfast while I creak my way out of bed, and thank god for that, but even once I’m up and moving it’s a while before I feel ready to deal with two small loud-ass children, which is unfortunate, because THERE THEY ARE, and shockingly no one’s willing to leave me be for twenty minutes while I suck down half a pot of coffee. Now, to be sure, I’m not much of a morning person to begin with, but I have to assume that the interrupted sleep is no small contributor to the way I feel at the start of each day: cranky, headachy, and generally mentally impaired. I had quite enough of that during my drinking years, thank you very much.
So: sleep training. I hate having to do it — not because I think it’s cruel, but because I hate the feeling of lying there listening to the crying (there is no escaping it, by the way, sound travels at an alarmingly effective rate from one end of our house to the other and easily permeates earplugs and Unisom-dosings, both of which I have tried) and feeling something like a full-body heart attack in response and KNOWING that if I just got up and went in there I could be back in bed and sleeping in less than 15 minutes — but I don’t know what else to do. Dylan’s over a year old now and there seem to be no signs that he’s going to figure it out on his own.
Things we have tried:
• Different bedtimes (7:45-8 PM is his usual bedtime, at least before the beshitted DST, and it doesn’t help to push it back later.)
• Feeding him as much as possible before bed. Makes no difference.
• Adjusting his temperature (using warmer/cooler bedclothes). Makes no difference.
• Benadryl. Shut up. Also, doesn’t really help — he maybe goes a little longer before the first wakeup, but that’s it.
Things we aren’t willing to try:
• Bringing him to bed with us.
• Messing with his naptime: it’s pretty steady at 12-2 PM or so and I see no reason to fuck with a good thing there.
Things I tried before that sucked and I didn’t stick with them but I guess I’m willing to try again:
• Crying it out, Ferber-style or otherwise
• Watering down the milk in his bottle (oh my GOD. He was SO FUCKING MAD. It was like holding a LIVE HORNET. A FAT ANGRY BOTTLE-THROWING HORNET)
Your sleep-improvement suggestions are more than welcome, as always.
Lastly, to hopefully offset my kvetching in some small way, here’s a video I posted on Flickr this weekend of Dylan first learning to walk. Ah, babies. Even if they suck up your sleep for an entire year and change, they’re worth every compensatory Red Bull.
Mar
6
I have this vague, partially-suppressed memory of Riley’s 18-month stage being really tough — the tantruming, the half-assed mobility, the inability to communicate — but hoo boy, Dylan’s either an early achiever or he’s going to be absolutely intolerable in a few more months, because at one year and change this child is siphoning away my will to live on a daily basis. Our good-natured butterball has been replaced by a mercurial creature whose moods fluctuate wildly based on such mission-critical variables as the amount of milk sloshing around in his round belly, the precise alignment of the planets, and the accessibility of the television remote. He still laughs easily and is quick to flash his ladykiller grins at the things that delight him — his brother, the cat (“gee gah!”), his parents crawling around acting like damn fools in an attempt to distract and entertain — but his forays into the Land of Contentment are achingly brief, not nearly long enough to enjoy a full cup of coffee or empty the dishwasher or go check Twitter in hopes of hearing news from Jonniker.
He is in a high-maintenance stage for sure, and if he’s not howling or furtively attempting to swallow a shoelace or managing to shake every last drop of milk from bottle to carpet, he’s falling facefirst into sharp wooden objects in the amount of time it takes to blink an eye.
Immediately after this happened I saw a giant cut flap of skin on his nose turn white and for a moment I thought it was EXPOSED BONE and I DIED. Then it started oozing blood and I was all, whew! And then I was all, OH MY GOD.
It was our entertainment stand that he fell into, and I’m starting to wonder if the thing has got some kind of Christine taste-of-flesh demon vibe going on because Riley had just fallen backwards into it not 12 hours before, giving himself a massive lump on the back of the head. No one’s hurt themselves on this thing before, so . . . I don’t know. I’ve got my eye on you, Shelfy.
Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but babies have weirdly sped-up healing abilities for things like cuts and bruises and Dylan already looks much better, but then just this morning I observed him crawling under the kitchen table, attempting to stand up, smashing his skull into the bottom of the table surface, then doing it AGAIN, HARDER — wailing all the while — before I managed to drag him out of there. Babies = the ultimate fail.
It’s definitely frustrating to be constantly chasing, soothing, and generally trying to figure out what in the blue fuck is wrong. Is he hungry? Tired? Teething? Disappointed by the lack of talent on this year’s American Idol? Humiliated because daycare sent him home in this astounding shirt yesterday, thanks to his loser parents forgetting to bring in extra clothes?
But I also feel bad for Riley. I mean, he loves his brother and they spend a lot of time playing together, but by necessity it seems like Dylan sucks up most of our attention and Riley is constantly being told to hang on, just a minute, you’ll get your juice when I’m finished feeding Dylan, etc. Or worse — and this is hard to admit — my patience is often stretched paper-thin by the whining baby and the barrage of “whys” and “but I waaaaaaaant tos” from the 3-year-old send me flying right over some kind of edge and I bark TO YOUR ROOM! at Riley when in fact I would like VERY much to send DYLAN to his room.
Ah, none of this is easy. I don’t know. I know I could be doing better, but I hope I’m doing okay. I hope both my kids know how much I love them, and how rich and stupidly blessed I feel as their mother. If there are moments when everything seems shrill and brittle and on the verge of complete disaster, there are so many more when it simply doesn’t seem as if there is enough room in the world for all the good things I have at hand.
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