Sleep Training My One Year Old, Part 2: Results

So, how did it go, after all?

Well, that depends on your expectations. I consider it at least a partial success, as the baby can now be placed in his crib around 7 p.m. and will only fuss or cry a few minutes at most, and sometimes not at all. Last night he called "Mama" once or twice, and then did a little babbling to himself before falling asleep.

So he can fall asleep on his own, but staying asleep doesn't always happen. Last night, for instance, he woke at 12:50 and joined me in bed, snuggling on my chest. Then he woke again around 3, and wouldn't stop crying till I held him on my chest again. But when he decided he wanted to change position and squirmed off of me, he cried again until I picked him back up. This followed a night in which he slept from 7:30 to 6:50 a.m., uninterrupted. Little weirdo.

Below is the play-by-play of the first week of training, for anyone going through the same thing and wondering if it will ever get better. I generally wrote the notes in the morning before work, updating them later when my husband gave me his wake-up times. We started on a Tuesday evening, so most of these were work-days...which, in retrospect, might not have been the best idea, especially because I was not in control of his daytime naps on those days and was not sure how well-rested he would be. But again, with a baby, you do what you have to whenever you manage to do it.

Night 1: Cried standing up for 40 mins while I sat on the bed wearing earplugs and feeling like a torturer. I lay down to show him what to do, but he was stubbornly standing even when he started to fall asleep. He just rested his head on the side of the crib and continued to stand there, whimpering and occasionally outright crying at me. Eventually, I stood up and laid him down and rubbed his back as he snuffled and snivelled to sleep just before 8 pm. He woke at 3 am and was impossible to settle without a little bit of breast. He fell asleep again around 5 and slept till my husband woke him around 7 because he had to leave for university.

Night 2: Cried for two full hours, one with me sitting next to him, then another hour with his father cajoling and wheedling and eventually lying on the floor next to him. Fell asleep just after 9 pm. Woke at 3:40 and was again inconsolable without a little suckle, but only for a minute or so. Then kicked and tossed till I got up at 5, then fussed some more till his dad put him to sleep again around 5:30. Slept till 8:20. 

Night 3: Very sleepy while eating dinner and being bathed, so we tried to put him down a bit before 7. Clung a bit as we went toward crib. Stayed lying down when I put him there, but crying loudly and miserably. Eventually stood up to reach for me, but I lay on the bed and kept my eyes closed and pretended to be asleep. After a while, he lay himself down again and cried and whimpered for a total of 22 mins. Then fell asleep by 7:13. He woke at 11:30, came to bed but didn’t get a boob, and eventually fell asleep again till he was woken by Maurizio, who had to leave for work by 7:40.

Night 4:
I was alone with him in the evening, so we were relaxed. We chatted to my family, climbed the stairs a few times, took a bath, snuggled on the sofa listening to Christmas music, and then headed to bed around 6:55. He clung again as I neared the crib, but when I laid him down he didn’t get up, just lay there crying. And the crying only lasted about 8 minutes, at which point I tried to come over and check to see if he had kicked off his blankets, but he must have heard/felt me, because he immediately woke up and stood up, so I jumped back into my own bed and hid under the covers while he whimpered and re-settled himself, and then went back to sleep. I didn’t dare to move, so I dozed there for about 20 minutes till I heard Maurizio come home, and assumed it was probably safe. We went downstairs and ate dinner and watched some TV, and the baby woke at 9:40 and was crying to be picked up, and we discovered he had a poo, so we cleaned him and creamed his red bum, and then I brought him into bed and snuggled him (refusing all insistent requests for breast) till he fell asleep again. He woke in the early hours (maybe 4:30? I didn’t check this time) and kicked around for an hour, then resettled around 6, but at that point my back was hurting and I had to tinkle, so I got up at 6:20 and slipped out of the room. He was stirring again by 6:50 and up by 7.

Night 5:
Saturday, and we had gone to a Thanksgiving dinner in the north of the city, so we didn’t get him home till about 8 p.m., and he had just fallen asleep in the car when we arrived. I simply removed his sweater and shoes and put him to bed by 8:17. He barely even protested, just a whimper or two. He woke at 4:15 and came to our bed, looking for breast and very upset when he didn’t get it. I almost gave in, because he hadn’t eaten much by way of dinner and I thought he was hungry, but Maurizio told me to stay strong and resist, so I did, and eventually (after an hour or so of kicking), he fell back to sleep. But we had to be up by 5:30 to go to the lake, and I had to wake him at 6:40 to get him dressed.

Night 6:
I put him in his crib at 7:21, and he stood up and cried at me for a few minutes, but as I got into bed and stayed there, he eventually lay back down and went to sleep. Was out before 7:30, and stayed there all night! Was still sleeping in his own bed when I left just after 6 a.m., and husband says he woke a little before 7.

Night 7:
His nap was interrupted earlier in the day, so he was really tired, and husband thought we should try to put him down early. I was skeptical, but gave in and tried to put him down around 6:35. He clung to me as I put him down and then cried for 5 minutes and went to sleep, but when I checked on him, he was in a really uncomfortable-looking twisted position. So I tried gently to adjust him, and his little head popped up and he saw me. I retreated hastily to the bed to show him what to do, but he was standing now, and he cried for a good 10 more minutes before lying back down and snuffling to sleep just before 7 pm. Poor baby. And then he woke at 1:52 a.m. and joined us in bed, but very sweetly clung to my chest for the first half-hour or so before rolling away. And he woke again around 3:30 or 4 to moan and flop and kick and readjust for a while, but then slept till 7.

Night 8:
He went down at 7:20 and cried for only 3 minutes. He moaned a little around 4, and readjusted quite a few times, but stayed put. Then he woke at 6 or so when my husband got up to tinkle. (I, of course, had tinkled at 4, but in the other bathroom, moving like a ninja to slip past the crib and out the door!)  

Reflection:
After a week of this training, the baby does appear to be regularly going to sleep on his own, which is a big win for me, and if we manage to get another night or two where he doesn’t wake up and join us, I will consider the whole process a success. It has been emotionally painful, but I think we were all ready to have this happen. The hardest part is realising how much I am going to miss his little snuggles in the middle of the night. And, because we have weaned down to one breastfeed a day (and there isn’t much left for him at this point, anyway), I am starting to miss being able to use the power of the breast to calm and soothe him. He has entered a tantrum stage, and all I can do now is ignore, distract, or carry him till they stop. I knew this day would come, but like all steps in his growth out of babyhood, it is making me nostalgic and weepy. Nevertheless, we are on our way to being a Big Boy and a Less Tired Mommy, so hopefully everyone will adjust and enjoy the new stage.

Sleep Training My One Year Old, Part 1: The Buildup

Thomas, like many babies, is wide awake when he should be a sleeping train...

My husband and I have recently implemented some sleep training with our little boy, who is just about one year and two months old. In the run-up to said implementation, I did some reading and some thinking and some writing about what I expected to happen. Here are those notes, which will be followed by a Part II in which I comment on the success of the training:

Sleep training. 

Who invented the term? It sounds innocuous, like potty training or puppy training—and like both of those, is much more difficult and complicated and frustrating than you might expect. Google N-gram (a super-fun tool for word nerds like me) says that the phrase only started to appear in books around 1920, but its use has exploded in the 2000s.

This age of internet experts and mom shaming and myriad platforms for passing on advice has resulted in sleep training becoming standard practice, as established as breastfeeding and vaccinating (yes, I say that with full awareness of the potential irony). Naturally, when I became a mother, I started to read nearly everything the web had to offer on these topics and others. My Google search history for those early months must be hilarious. (Just checked…it includes such gems as “screaming during diaper changes,” “really sore nipples,” “baby wants to suck constantly,” ‘baby still hungry after nursing,” and “how to help your baby poop.” Later there are queries on the topics of crying, fussing, colic, burping, and gas.) I didn’t start looking up sleep till the baby was a few months old, but pretty early on, my husband wanted to establish his bedtime at 7:00–7:30 p.m. He said his ex had done this with their son, and that the child continued to go to bed at that time till he was a teenager. My husband also said that it would be good for the two of us as a couple to have adult time after the baby went to sleep.

Stolen from here.

This sounds good in theory, but in practice it hasn’t quite worked out. We aim for 7:00, but depending on how many naps the baby has had that day, what he has eaten, how early we can each get home from work, and how stubborn he feels like being, bedtime has ranged from between 7:00 and 10:00 p.m. He has had a routine almost all his life that involves a bath, fresh pyjamas, a little song from each of us, and then nursing in the dark of the bedroom. That worked well for about the first 10 months, but he would always wake up within a few hours, and after the 10-month point he almost always woke up within an hour after I put him down. Then, as we approached the 1-year mark, it sometimes wouldn't work at all, and he would pull off the nipple smiling and playful and ready to slide off my lap and toddle around the room.

Recently there have been small improvements in his ability to sleep for longer periods of time during the night (after the first waking). He even spends large chunks of that time in his playpen (which we are still using in place of the crib we never got around to purchasing), and a few times he has come very close to sleeping through the night, waking only once to suckle a bit and then nodding right back off. I have no idea what caused these changes—maybe it was just time for him—but it gives us some hope that eventually we will not have to work so hard at this.

I am not sure if we have been “training” him in any real sense of the word, but I know we have never just let him fall asleep without some kind of aid (rocking, pushing in the stroller, nursing, etc.), and I do eventually want him to be able to put himself to sleep. However, from what I have read, it seems that even people who have properly trained their children by letting them cry or by the shush-pat method or the fading method or any other method still sometimes experience difficulties (or so-called sleep regressions), so I am not letting myself worry too much.

People have been telling me since he was four months old that “he ought to be sleeping through the night by now,” but for the moment we can’t seem to put into regular practice any of the methods or techniques. Because of the layout of our apartment, we are room-sharing, and because of our early mornings, we try to get to bed within two hours of putting him down. This means we risk waking him with our own noise and movements, and it means that we can’t use a regular white noise machine (my husband can’t stand them), and that we can’t just ignore him when he is crying in the night.

So we’re doing what we can to survive, and hoping that one day he figures out that sleep is awesome and that he wants to do it.

I Do Want To Grow Up

Second star to the right...

The recent closing due to bankruptcy of the well-loved Toys R Us chain has caused all manner of moaning and wailing from former Toys R Us Kids in my generation. The catchy jingle that none of us could ever forget has become almost a mantra for those of us reluctantly dealing with the responsibilities of adulthood. I can’t claim to have mastered them, myself, but I often reflect on just how ill-prepared my generation seems to be for those responsibilities. We have an overdeveloped sense of nostalgia for our childhoods, which we idealise and idolise, but we also have an unhealthy fear of maturity. I suppose it is hard to get excited about paying bills and making appointments and buying groceries and cleaning toilets…but there used to be a sense of achievement and pride associated with these things that has gotten lost somewhere. Rudyard Kipling writes about the impressive feat that is achieved in becoming "a Man, my son!" Maya Angelou celebrates her own "inner mystery" as a Phenomenal Woman. Robert Hayden describes his father thanklessly performing "love's austere and lonely offices" for an indifferent child. Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth Bennet's best friend in Pride and Prejudice) speaks of the importance having her own house, and the independence as well as security she derives from it. Lizzie, herself, even acknowledges that “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!”

Young people today do not eagerly anticipate adulthood, though they may be impatient for some of its privileges. It is de rigueur to espouse admiration of children and resistance to growing up, from Dr. Seuss saying that “Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them” to Maggie Smith’s Wendy telling Peter Pan’s children that growing up is against her house rules. I think there has been a misinterpretation, though. People say they wish to remain forever young in their hearts, to see the world through childlike eyes, but they mistakenly equate that with childish behaviour. Even worse, they are encouraged in this by the mirror of culture. People are told to feel victimised, to feel helpless, to rage against the circumstances of the world in impotent gestures. Indeed, the infantilisation of the adult population has been developing for decades, but it really took root… when?

SO, WHAT?

I think of Wordsworth and others in the mid-18th century idealising childhood as a time of innocence and purity. Then I think of the Victorian era, when in practice children were tiny adults, seen and not heard, restricted in everything they did, but in literature were often held up as moral paragons and heroes (think of Oliver Twist or of the Alice books). This continued into the 20th century, with the most obvious example being Barrie’s Peter Pan in 1904—a little boy who refused to grow up even as real children continued to dress and act like their parents and sometimes even go to work. This Cult of Childhood was celebratory and exaggerated, but it didn’t give (most) adults the excuse to remain perpetual children. So maybe the change happened later.

Nonsense

During the World Wars everyone had to “put away childish things” in order to survive, so perhaps it was those late 1940s and early '50s parents who restarted the movement with their baby boom. They were experiencing new prosperity and wanted to give their children easier lives than they had had, so they provided them with comfortable homes and modern appliances and plenty of toys, preserving childhood as a carefree and happy Garden of Eden. Like their biblical forbears, when those children reached technical adulthood in the '60s and '70s they suddenly rebelled against everything their parents had stood for, rejecting responsibility and eschewing rules. It was this generation that decided it was better to be friends with their children instead of parents to them, especially because both parents often had to work and neither wanted to be seen as the “disciplinarian” in the short time they could spend with the children.

Perfect parody of a sad situation.

(Actually, I have just stumbled upon an interesting article by Marie Winn in the NY Times that covers a lot of what I am saying here, and goes into even more detail. Winn notes that, "now, the child is enlisted as an accomplice in his own upbringing. And everywhere parents are explicating the texts of themselves, pleading for their children to agree, to forgive, to understand, instead of simply telling them what to do. The child has come to seem a psychological equal.”)

I suspect along with Winn that a lot of this has to do with the breakdown of the traditional family and the traditional role of the woman in society, as well as the rise of Freudian psychology. All this was followed by the flashy 1980s--which made children of us all, dressing adults in neon colours and wild animal prints, celebrating music stars who were overgrown children, themselves--and the '90s and 2000s, which were a time of commercialisation of youth culture, and now here we are in the 2010s with a world full of people who think “adulting” is a word and who want accolades for even trying to do the things they are supposed to do.

Don't get me started on hashtags.

No wonder everyone is offended all the time, because we have nothing demanded of us, no standards to which we might reasonably hold ourselves, so any censure seems to come from nowhere and appears entirely unmerited. We are the overgrown babies of Huxley’s Brave New World, crying for our pleasure reels and our soma, with no way of gaining any perspective from which to understand how wrong we are.

I have been rereading a book called “Good Influence: Teaching the Wisdom of Adulthood” by Daniel R. Heischman in preparation for returning to teaching. It was given to me during the penultimate year of my first teaching position at Doane Academy in NJ, and it makes some really salient points about the importance of adults acting like adults when they are around children (as parents or teachers or coaches). He identifies quite pointedly what I think is the source of the Peter Pan syndrome rampant amongst adults these days: a lack of confidence.

Heischman's cover

“In a world of competing truth claims," he writes, "how can we parents and teachers be certain that what we believe is worth seeking to impress upon young people? ‘Who am I,’ the adult asks, ‘to think I can impose my beliefs onto my children or my students? Will they even listen to what I might say?’ Indeed, I am convinced that a part of the desire some parents have had in recent decades to allow their son or daughter to choose their own values as they grow is a way to sidestep the ambivalence they themselves might feel about the quality and enduring value of their own convictions” (25).

I admit suffering from this lack of assurance, myself, in certain areas. Now that I am teaching again, I sense returning upon me the indignation I always feel when students are being rude (ignoring instructions, playing on their phones, chewing gum in class, talking over each other). I have been even more horrified to observe the supposed adults acting the same way—ignoring the speaker at an assembly, talking over the opening address, scrolling through Instagram instead of paying attention. It has been suggested to me that this is a cultural difference; that Colombians are talkative by nature and must be forgiven, but I find that a weak excuse. The rules of polite behaviour are not something I question. But there are larger philosophical questions raised in faculty meetings like, “should we assign homework?” and “can we take points off of academic grades because of poor behaviour?” that deal with some more complex issues and can make me question whether the way I did things is indeed the only (or the best) way to do things.

And yet…and yet…I remain convinced that my students need and will seek out structure; that they require models of integrity, authority, wisdom, and judgment (yes, that dirty word); and that they need to see the differences between them and us, if only to have something to define themselves against. I may be on a one-woman mission, but I am going to do my best to honour this obligation to them.

So that they may grow up, I will be a grown-up.

Our Last Day

Crawling over all in his path

Today is my last day as a stay-at-home mom. I have had ten delightful months with my beautiful little boy, but tomorrow I will start a new teaching job that will keep me out of the house from 6:15 a.m. till at least 4:15 p.m. I feel simultaneously extremely lucky—I know people who have had to return to work a mere eight or twelve weeks after their babies were born—and yet also unjustly oppressed, as I want so much to stay with him and to teach him and to watch him grow. It is trite to say, but babies change so very quickly, and they are constantly learning. I know everything about him right now: every mark on his body, every habit, every babble, every smile; I know where they come from or when they started. I know he has five teeth and that he can crawl and that he loves toddling around in the walker or drunkenly stumbling while someone holds his hands. Doors are his current passion: opening and closing cupboards and sliding doors and even book covers can entertain him for ages. I know he has good balance and is very curious and wilful. I know that he loves making P and B sounds, and that he occasionally screams just to see what it is like. When he picks up a new object, he twirls it around in his hand to examine it from all angles before plucking at it to see if it moves, bends, or tears. I know when he is crying from frustration and when he is tired and when he just wants his mommy. And I am heartbroken to be the one who has to take his mommy away.

I have not even been able to indulge in these last days with him, because we have had to hire a nanny, and she has been here learning his routines and needs and personality. She is lovely, and she cooks and cleans in addition to taking care of the baby, which is extremely helpful, even if I find it rather invasive. (I know that sounds horribly ungrateful, but I have never liked having someone else in my kitchen and laundry room, doing things their own way, especially when I feel like I can't clearly communicate in their language.) The baby is happy and well cared for; he enjoys playing with her and being carried by her, but she isn’t me, and he deserves me. My mother-in-law is also arriving today, to help out in the first week or so whenever Maurizio and I are both at work, which is very kind of her and will give us peace of mind, so I feel all the more guilty for considering it another form of interruption. I feel like Celia Johnson’s Laura in the 1945 film "Brief Encounter," when she and Alec (Trevor Howard) are trying to say their final goodbyes and Dolly Messiter bumbles in.

Poor, well-meaning, irritating Dolly Messiter. Crashing into those last few, precious minutes we had together...

I could have raised a proper Kewpie doll

I know in my rational mind that this is not The End. I know that my little baby will be even more excited to see me in the evenings, and that he will probably snuggle me all night, if I let him. I know that I will see him all day on weekends and holidays, and that I get those long breaks that make the teaching profession so pleasant for mothers. But I also know that I am going to be tired and distracted sometimes, that I may have to bring home work, be it planning or marking, and that I am going to miss some important milestones of his development. And I have this sense of irrational, impotent, and directionless anger, which I want to hurl at my husband for not being a better saver, or at the teaching profession for not providing little nurseries in the classrooms, or at the entire feminist movement for taking women out of the home and thrusting us into the workplace whether we wanted to be there or not.

Ms. Frizzle, style icon

Adding to my emotional state are the typical nerves over starting a new job, wondering whether my colleagues and students will like me, wondering how long it will take me to learn everyone’s names and to figure out where things are, all compounded with concerns over how and where and when I am going to pump breast milk and whether I own enough breast-accessible dresses that are also work-appropriate. I haven’t had to get out of bed before 6:30 in a few months (mostly because I still bring the baby to bed with me somewhere around the 1 a.m. feeding, so when he whines around 5 I just turn over and give him another breast), so I need to re-acclimate to early alarms and decide whether I will shower the night before and try to deal with my curly mess in the morning or will get up a bit earlier to shower before work. My husband and I have to work out a new routine. Before the baby was born, I would get up at 3:50 and get on the ergometer for some exercise before showering at 4:40 and getting dressed while my husband made me breakfast. He would then drive me to the bus stop at 5:20, and then start his own day. This worked well for just the two of us, but I don’t see it being feasible with the little guy, even if we do get ourselves to bed by 9 p.m., which is unlikely. And sleep-deprivation makes it hard for me to concentrate, so I worry that I won’t be an effective teacher, which will make me regret even more that I am giving up time with my own child...

Again, I know my situation is not unique, and that going back to work is a fact of life for most mothers today. I just wish it felt less forced, less rushed. There will come a time, I am certain, when I will be so exhausted by motherhood that I will be running out the door to work. But that time hasn't come yet, and I still have to go. Therefore, I need to mourn a little bit. Thanks for listening.

Locked Out

The last time I attempted to write a blog post was in the summer of 2016. It was a few months before the Head of the Charles (and my wedding!), and I was visiting my family in the US (as well as visiting the venue for the first time and making arrangements). Thinking it would be nice to do a little writing, I planned out some ideas and then tried to log into my Blogger account, but was told my password was incorrect. I tried another one, which was also incorrect. I looked at the super-secret document where I keep some of my passwords and confirmed that the first one had been correct, and I entered it again...and was told that my account would be locked because of too many attempts.

Drink if this has ever happened to you...

Having so much else to do, I decided not to worry about it and forgot about the lock-out till a few months after the wedding, when I wanted to write about our beautiful winter honeymoon in the north of Italy. Then I tried logging in and found, once again, that none of my passwords would work. I did some half-hearted internet searching to see why Google was being so recalcitrant, and considered trying to contact them directly, but there isn't actually a listed contact address or phone number for that sort of thing. Google expects you to resolve your own problems using their Help pages, but if you problem isn't there, there isn't much you can do beyond posting in forums, which is something I have never done. So again, I gave up on it.

The whole succeeding year of 2017 passed in a flurry of pregnancy, job changes, giving birth, learning what motherhood is about, and trying to keep my brains from being addled by sleeplessness, and I did not try to access my blog again until yesterday. When I entered my original password. Again. But this time, by some miracle, it worked.

Surprise!

So, now that I have successfully re-entered the blogosphere, I will see if I can get myself writing again, if only to keep in practice. I am about to start a new teaching job here in Colombia, and I expect that plus mothering a ten-month-old boy will keep me pretty busy, but now and then it will be nice to put some thoughts on (virtual) paper and see how they flow. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to any responses.