The hardest things, I think, we've learned about raising this little boy for nigh on 7 months, have been factors of letting go, stepping away, and releasing just a little bit of him.
Take the sleep. His sleep is still a work in progress in many ways, of course, but we do appear to be moving in a generally positive direction. Reid isn't a sound sleeper, by any means, and we aren't all bunking out for hours on end. But things are getting better.
One of the toughest lessons parents learn is the old 'let 'em cry' meme, which has many different permutations, nearly all unsavory. The gist of it, apparently, is that you reinforce his midnight awakenings and cryings for attention by actually paying him that attention. Therefore, when he awakes and shouting because he
needs us, we're supposed to ignore him. That way, he'll go back to sleep.
Well, K and I haven't really been comprehensive followers of this. We love that he needs us, even in the middle of the night. He does go back to sleep sometimes after a little crying, but he certainly doesn't cry for a half-hour without attention. (This is crucial, apparently, to one of the classic cry-to-learn methods, which involves extending the period of time during which you withhold your attention during midnight scream-fests. I believe this is just cruel.) We know he shouldn't need to eat in the middle of the night, but if he's wide awake and shouting, and it sounds like he's hungry, he'll eat. And if he eats, he'll happily go back to sleep. So what's wrong with that?
Probably alot, I guess. Reinforcement, bad associations and all that. (I don't much buy the subtle association thing, either. The association game is that the baby will associate things with sleep, like a pacifier, or being held, or listening to a certain musical toy play, and then he basically can't sleep without the thing. For the most part, those experiences need to end, because you need to put him down, the pacifier falls out, the song ends. It makes sense, but there is a line. If the baby comfortably falls asleep with a parent's hand resting on his tummy, is that a bad association? What about holding his baby blanket in his hands? I mean, the on-off nature of some of these (especially the pacifier) obviously disqualify them for meaningful sleep, but must the baby live like a monk? I ask you.) But the point is that we are gradually getting down to more long-sleeps, unless Reid wakes himself up with coughs (still a factor). However, getting to sleep has now become a more hit or miss affair.
It seems that he can fall asleep without much blowback, or he can decide to make your life a living hell as he refuses to surrender to the land of nod. And there are a hundred shades between.
But something we've begun to see work is just putting him down, and covering him up, and walking out of there, lights off. It turns out (and K discovered this somewhere on the web, though I have no idea if that means a thing) that the dramatic sleep-crying and rolling about is a performance for the parent sitting there waiting for him to go to sleep. Stop being the audience, it seems, and he stops showing off.
Whoa. This was something else. I decided to try it tonight. I laid him down. Normally, he scrabbles at his closed eyes, commonly scratching himself with his fast-growing nails. He rolls onto his side, flexing his back like an animal seeking escape. He grabs a handful of his blanket and jams it into his mouth, hooking it onto his teeth and then pulling at it. He rocks onto his side, back onto his back, gradually rotating in his crib until he's sideways and obviously uncomfortable.
Tonight, I cover him, kiss his forehead, click off the light and I'm gone.
I listen in on the monitor. He sounds like he's awake, but not shouting. He's licking his lips, he's rubbing his eyes, he's...asleep.
I noted to K afterwards that this was an amazing advancement. I also observed that our boy, like a velociraptor, is always learning, defeating old systems and forcing us to generate new ones. Perhaps this trick to get him to go sleep will last only a week. But at least it's a week.
This last batch of colds set up our new sleep schedule. After a nice run of night sleep (which went un-discussed in these electronic pages for fear of upsetting the cosmic balance that generated the eight-hour sleep blocks), we returned to one-feeding sleep with a hard time to getting down. Then last night, we got up at midnight, two, four, and then up for good at 5:30. So, tonight, we try again. He went down fighting. In fact, the whole fever-free day has been rife with struggles. Nice morning, bumpy afternoon, downright difficult evening. He even fell asleep mid-cry. Just cutting off the "wah" like "waa--" and then nothing.
