Once in a great while, heavenly bodies such as stars and planets align, forming a rare matrix for mankind to ponder in the night. Like those exceptional occurrences, one of these eons, your child will also sleep through the night.
The first year (or more), not so much. Your darling might wake up, twice, three, four, or five times a night. The standard for the first few months is at least every two hours. Around five or six months, sleep time stretches past the four or five-hour mark. And by a year, if you’re lucky, they’ll get to eleven, even twelve hours stretches of sleep. It’s glorious.
The mere change in the atmosphere when I tiptoe into our room to go to bed wakes him up, and when I go to comfort him, he knows it’s not Mommy, and then the wailing gets worse.
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Others, still wake up, and for various reasons. Our second-born son is rounding 15 months, and he still sleeps in our room. His crib is at the foot of our bed and he’s fortunate to get on-demand refills from Mommy’s breast throughout the night. His tummy wakes him and us up at 1 and 4 a.m. They’re delightfully consistent wake up calls.
Our pediatrician said by six months we should be putting baby down for the night, and not going back into his own room until morning. We tried this with our first-born son, but we couldn’t stand the pain his tears were causing us. We ended up feeding him (I fed him bottles since he needed more than breastmilk throughout the night) and we sleep trained him with a less emotional version of cry-it-out (longer and longer method, Dr. Harvey Karp, The Happiest Baby on the Block) And it worked. By 18-months or so, he was clocking twelve hours.
We’ll get there one of these days with our second son. We’ve created the conditions for him to be a roommate, and not a solo sleeper. Has it impacted us? Yes. Me especially. The mere change in the atmosphere when I tiptoe into our room to go to bed wakes him up, and when I go to comfort him, he knows it’s not Mommy, and then the wailing gets worse. It was so different with my first son, who relied on me to get him through the night with a cold one and some rocking.
Whether it’s bottle or breast, Mommy or Daddy, those two or so years in which we wreck our circadian rhythms, do evolve.
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The other night though, we had a breakthrough. Around 4 a.m., my body clock, now programmed to wake when Smalls wakes, roused me to a room of only white noise and the gentle breeze of the ceiling fan, slicing the cool air above our bed and the crib. I jumped up to see if everything was okay. My wife was deep in slumber, and when I peeked over to check on babe, he was tucked into child’s pose, sawing toothpicks. He went on to sleep another four hours. The stars hath aligned.
So, it’s not consistent, but it’s getting there. And no, no two sons are alike. Whether it’s bottle or breast, Mommy or Daddy, those two or so years in which we wreck our circadian rhythms, do evolve. The heavens eventually fall back into alignment, and our little ones find their paths to Dreamland the way they’re meant to: on their own.
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Photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker.