Sleep Saga

So I could probably spend a few hours chronicling our sleep issues with Bear. I think I'll pass on my pity party and say we've gotten ourself in a huge pickle with this kid. He is one of the most (if not the most) stubborn child I've ever met. (Jamie says he gets it from me. If that's true we are in trouble!) I know it's our fault because we've obviously not sent the right boundaries. It's just so much harder than I ever imagined!

Our goal is simple we want him to sleep through the night- in his crib- without nursing. Do we ask for too much? He has lungs that never give up. I'm surprised the neighbors we have upstairs haven't complained about us or moved. Last week he was up every night for hours on end. I'm talking 3-4 hours non-stop wailing. We'd made so much progress previously. Out trip to Snowshoe just tilted the whole balance we had on end. He went from waking up at 5:30 to 4:30 to 3:30 to 2 and then to midnight. And if you didn't pick him up he just wouldn't stop. We pulled out the ear plugs even- nothing worked. We just don't do well on the whole sleep deprivation diet. Seriously I can see how sleep deprivation is a form of torture!

So we've had to compromise yet again and the last three nights he has slept through the night until 5:30 am and not going back to sleep. BUT this morning after 30 minutes he went back to sleep!!! He was up right at 7 though and he went right to the couch ready to nurse and SCREAMED holy heck when I got Coop out of bed. But then he nursed and was happy as a clam. Here's hoping we are onto something!

Sleep Update

Our sleep issues have started to balance out for a the time being. Bear takes a nap pretty regularly now either in his high chair or on the couch. I'm only hijacked every once in a while now and when I am I just study while he naps on my lap. At night he goes down with Jim without nursing and there were a few nights he would wake me up pinching me so I wouldn't let him nurse. After 4 nights he stopped pinching me and we can get through most of the night without waking me up if he does nurse. I have this one book about Healthy Sleep and just read a few pages. It made reference to if you think kids are going to not have issues with going to sleep or being left alone then you are crazy. That helped me just with my perspective. I had this unrealistic expectation that Bear should just be ok to go to sleep without me when that is all he's ever known. He still hates to wake up alone but he just sits there and fusses and waits for us now.

When we went to a training convention in Atlanta omg I thought I was going to die. If we sleep in the same room Coop has to sleep in the same bed as me and Bear and he will roll on Bear if he's in between us. At one point Coop had me and Bear pushed all the way to the edge. In the middle of the night Bear fell out of the bed!! My cousin Haley was there watching the boys during the day and I could just hear her snicker! It took me two weeks to recover from that weekend!!

Bear's finally starting to get his chewing teeth in and then I'll feel good about him getting enough to eat without having to nurse. It's new territory for me. The kid is all about nursing!!

Spontaneous Naptime

Poppi has found his way to get Bear down for a nap. He puts on soccer and Bear will climb into the recliner and sit in between his legs. As the game goes on he will sink lower, and lower, and lower and then Poppi will kick out the bottom and a new nap place has been born!

Round 1 Goes To Bear

Okay. The score at this point is Bear 1 Parents 0.

Not worried, though. We're the parents...we're going to have many many wins when Bear's a teenager and wants to do things. I'm practicing it now..."Because I'm the parent and because I said so!"

We've been trying for the past two months to ween Bear off nursing at night as his method to go to sleep. We put a crib in the room next to the bed and adjusted it so that his mattress was level with our's. After the first three weeks like that, we lowered the mattresses and I had the pleasure of putting him to sleep since he couldn't nurse off of me. It worked great that way for some time. He'd wake up and fuss, I'd rub his back and talk to him, and he'd go back to sleep. He would, of course, still nurse throughout the night at selected times b/c he still did need to eat, but not the point where he would have to be in bed with us.

In the past two weeks, he's resisted our efforts to the point where he wouldn't go back to sleep and would really have a fit if I didn't pull him out of the crib and hand him to Abbie in order to nurse or at least to let him lie on my stomach and chest to go to sleep.

The little bugger has both mine and Abbie's stubborn streaks, I'm afraid.

Abbie's friend, Jamie, told her that he's going to be more stubborn than us and to keep trying, although most children should be weened between 18 months and 2 years. Bear's only 15 months...not quite in the range where we can let the little bird leave the nest. So last night, I raised his bed back up and went back to the original method we had where his crib was his bed, but Abbie could nurse him as needed just by rolling over onto his mattress.

We'll ween him eventually. But he's not eating his solid foods as well as we'd like, and its a fight we've decided we would rather fight later on.

Sleep Update

Jim posted in June our sleep issues with Bear. I would love to report that we now have a happily sleeping baby Bear who goes down on demand and stays asleep all night. But I can’t. Unfortunately Bear has been blessed with the stubborn gene and a really good set of lungs that I’m sure have been keeping up our neighbors. It was a big deal when we were able to get him to go to sleep without nursing at his bed time. It was awesome when we could get him to go back down without nursing after his first initial waking up somewhere around 10 pm. Even better was when we could get him to take his afternoon nap without nursing. Now we are trying to take the 2 am nursing away and he is not a happy camper. Unfortunately for him his momma is even more of an unhappy camper so he has to suffer. He started to pinch, scratch and pull at his 2 am feeding waking me up and keeping me in severe pain. I was willing to let him nurse as long as I could sleep through it. Once that stopped and I went for almost a week being woken up and kept up by his little shenanigans well, I was no longer playing that little game. So his crib got lowered and Jim and I switched sides on the bed and we do not have a happy little Bear from 2-4 am. It’s only been three nights and each change has taken us two weeks to implement so I’m suspecting we still have a few more nights of unpleasantness.

I came across an article in Baby Magazine this week that just made me feel better. I’ve been doubting our process and feeling like I should have sacrificed my sleep in the early months instead of now when he’s more stubborn and feeling guilty because he is so unhappy and has dark circles under his eyes from lack of sleep and feeling like we just did it all wrong. But this article basically says if you have a baby you are going to go through sleep issues it’s just the way it is. We all deal with it in different ways and there is no “right” way. Even if she’s wrong I like it and I’m going with it. I am blessed with a husband willing to do all the hard work because without him I'm not sure if we would be getting any sleep at all. It's almost (ok really) frustrating that Jim can put him down without there even being a fuss but if it's me he will scream and scream! He's got his mommy's number.

My other tactic has been to wear him out in the morning so he will sleep his whole nap without waking up. I will do just about anything to keep him awake in the car to get him in the house and put him to sleep in the crib! I've gotten them both so tuckered they have just fallen out a few times utterly exhausted and of course provided me with the cutest pictures!

Ouch

If you read the last post, and I'm assuming that if you're one of those that check this regularly, you read about Cooper and his running at you and going "ooofff" as he rams his little head into your leg/butt/crotch. Well, I thought it was funny b/c he was doing it to Abbie and not me. This week, it hit home for me. I was sitting in one of the dining table chairs, and all of a sudden, I get this immense pain in my left kidney, kinda like a boxer hit me there. I turn around, and there's Cooper with this shit eating grin on his face. And I wanna say, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Instead, I just tell him its not nice to head butt people. I think all he heard from me was, "Wa-Wa, Wa-Wa, Wa-Wa". Then he turned around and went back to playing like nothing happened. Just weird. I think we're going to rename him Damien.

Oh, the other ouch to tell y'all about. We're trying to ween Bear from nursing to go to sleep. So we bought a second crib for him and put it up against our bed so he has a bed that opens to our's and that way, he can learn to sleep in his own bed while still being able to be touched by one of us to calm him. So, we get that set up and the first night, it works like a charm. After that, its been really hard on Bear. He screams for hours on end b/c he wants to nurse. His initial going to sleep at night is quiet and calm and he's down for the count. But at 11, about an hour after we've gone to bed and are just starting to drift into La-La land, he wakes up and starts screaming. So I scoot over to his side to try and calm him and put him down. If its Abbie, then he just wants to nurse. Last night was one of the worst we've had yet. He woke up and screamed, not cried, but screamed for an hour. I lasted about that hour, then turned him over to Abbie as the last ounce of patience I had seeped out of my ears. It was rough. Somehow, though, she got him down. I'm not sure how because I think I fell asleep. It's going to be a rough couple of weeks to couple of months as we work with Bear on all this.

The Magic Chair

Spontaneous Naptime

Nothing beats a day when you just lay Sully down and if is tired he just sort of drifts off to sleep. He opens one eye to make sure I'm there every once in a while and then bam he's out! This is picture of him over a month ago, but he's been taking these spontaneous naps lately so it reminded me to put up a picture!

Magic Blue Chair

These pictures were taken over a month ago, but too cute not to post. I found them both in this chair fast asleep knocking out some z's.

Exhausted.....just fell asleep on the floor!

My Sleeping Beauties