I want to start off by saying I hate the term "sleep training." I hate it the same way I hate when women talk about training their husbands (though I hate that a little more). To me, training is not something humans do to other humans. When discussing the process of helping our children develop healthy sleep habits, I would much prefer the words teaching, guiding or encouraging. With that said, I would like to discuss a bump we've hit on the road to guiding our son to a full night's sleep.
By the time my son, Matthew, was four months old, he was sleeping through the night. I think our success is a combination of choices that my husband and I made and the happy fact that Matty happens to be a good sleeper. Whatever the reason, it did not take long for me to get used to having a baby who was sleeping nine to ten hours a night. There were still nights when he might wake up around midnight or one and whimper a bit, but a quick visit to pop a pacifier in his mouth usually did the trick. I was so glad to say goodbye to middle-of-the-night feedings and hour-long rocking sessions to calm him down and get him back to sleep.
And then he got sick. And we're not talking about a quick, two-day bug that was miserable while it lasted but then made a swift exit. We're talking about a fever-filled, stuffy-nosed, coughing-fits-in-the-middle-of-the-night virus to end all viruses. And it was awful. To tell you the truth, I was caught a bit off guard. I know that babies get sick, especially babies who are in daycare with other babies all day long. I was expecting this. And yet, I was unprepared for the havoc it would wreak on our nights.
The hardest thing for me was that my poor little guy was just so unhappy. A nose-breather, as most babies are, Matty's biggest problem was that with his nose so stuffed, he was forced to breathe through his mouth. This meant no pacifier, which meant that he was at a loss for how to soothe himself to sleep. At the height of his sickness, he would wake up every hour and each time need some real TLC to have any chance of falling back to sleep. Under normal circumstances, I am happy to let him cry in his crib for a bit, hoping he will find a way to fall back to sleep on his own. On those healthy nights, I know there is nothing wrong and that he is just tired, so allowing him to figure it out on his own is my version of "teach a man to fish." On these sick nights, however, allowing him to cry is different. He is crying because he is sad, because he is sick and needs his parents, and so to leave him there seemed wrong and counterproductive. And so we began going in and holding him and rocking him and making sure he knew we were here and he was loved and telling him, though he can't understand, that if we could make it better, we would.
And for one night this felt fine. And even for two and for three. But then this thing didn't go away. And though he was no longer waking up every hour, he was waking up in the middle of the night coughing and crying for three weeks. And I still felt that I needed to go to him because he still sounded so sad. And yet, I worried that all the nights he spent teaching himself how to go to sleep on his own had been undone by this virus that sent us moving backwards instead of forward. I worried that he would begin to see this new routine as normal, and expect us to help him to sleep every night since that's what we'd done for him throughout his illness. I was afraid that we were making a very big mistake.
And then I remembered. I remembered a promise I made to myself the day Matthew made his entrance into this world. I promised that I would do my best. I promised that I wouldn't get bogged down with the 'right way' and the 'wrong way' but rather I would do what seemed right for us at the time. And during those weeks that my baby was sick, it felt right to go to him. It felt right to hold him and to kiss him and to make sure he is learning that even if we can't make it go away, we can provide comfort. And if that means a minor setback in our "sleep guiding," so be it.
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