Sleepy Time, Please!

Here is my least favorite thing about having children: getting them to sleep.

It has been a struggle for them since they were very small. The Boy was never much of a sleeper. From birth it was like he fought sleep for fear that he would miss something. The first several months of his life were spent on the couch in our family room with me discovering The West Wing and catching up on movies because he would not sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time if I put him down. So we sat, and nursed and sat and he slept off and on and my head bobbed and I watched TV and talked on the phone. Other than never getting anything done, it actually was a really sweet way to spend his infancy.

The Girl gave me hope that she would be my good sleeper. And she was for about four months. She slept at four hour intervals at birth and those sleep periods only grew longer as she got bigger. Everyone told me that since she was so big at birth (9lbs 1oz) that she would always be a great sleeper. But then she started teething and everything went to hell and a hand basket. She started getting up every two hours to nurse and stopped taking her long morning and afternoon naps.

The Boy didn’t sleep through the night until he was about 18 months old; The Girl was about 15 months by the time she finally started sleeping straight through.

Part of it was my choice to nurse on demand, which meant I never said no to either one of them when they asked to nurse. I think it almost became habitual with both of them and I definitely turned into a human pacifier for both of them.

As they’ve gotten bigger and older, I’ve kept the secret hope that there will just come a magic age where all of sudden they will learn the joy of sleeping. But as with most things with parenting (and being a kid) there really isn’t a magic age for anything. So in the mean time I guess I’ll just have another cocktail.