Adaptation
March 21st, 2009 by amylherzog
I was prepared for our sons to have different personalities, different ways of dealing with the world, different preferences and appearances. I wasn’t really prepared for the extent to which differences in our parenting would make the two boys different.
(Daniel is pretty much ready to crawl, by the way. There went my hopes for a second child that stayed put longer than his older brother did.)
We’re very different parents now, not only because we’re very different people, but because our parenting choices affect Jacob this time around, too. When Jacob was an infant, we followed one tenet of attachment parenting pretty closely: we took our cues for caring for Jacob, from Jacob. We relied on him to let us know when he was hungry, when he was tired, and so forth. Since I was staying home with Jacob and could sleep whenever Jacob slept, this worked extraordinarily well for us. Jacob was a disgustingly happy baby, and is a really great kid all around.
The one major place this approach failed us was with sleep. Jacob’s sleep was a problem up until about a month ago, if I’m honest with myself. He ate 5 or more times a night until we night-weaned him at 15 months. (Yes, you read that right.) He gave up his daytime nap about a year earlier than he should have, because he never napped in his crib and I eventually tired of driving him around and sitting in the car while he slept every day. His bedtime routine was more than an hour long, had to be followed precisely, and still sometimes didn’t work. He would toss and turn and yell for us 8 or 9 times every night until (about a month ago) we told him that we would check on him every 10 minutes, and other than that we weren’t coming back (except for an emergency). Through all of these problems, I mostly didn’t think about it, and if I did think about it shrugged and said he just wasn’t a great sleeper. Our next kid, statistically speaking, was likely to be better.
The next kid came around, and for awhile I seemed to be right. He didn’t want to sleep immediately after eating like Jacob did, so I started putting Daniel down in his crib/co-sleeper sidecar from day 1 when it had been the right amount of time (vaguely) since his last nap. This was mostly pragmatic on my part–I just couldn’t pay as much attention to Daniel as I had to Jacob, so I relied on the clock a lot more. The major outward signs of attachment parenting fell by the wayside, because they had to in order for our whole family to function: Jacob couldn’t possibly gracefully deal with the kind of inconvenience we had tolerated for his sake. Overall I think this change was a net positive in many ways, but especially sleep: Daniel’s first couple of months were a marked improvement over Jacob’s first months. He was only waking up twice at night, and sleeping well in between those wakings. During the day, he was taking regular naps in his crib and I had freedom of movement while he slept.
Somehow (when he got his first cold?), for some reason, around 3 months of age we started rocking him and generally handling his sleep more or less the way we’d handled Jacob’s sleep. Whenever he woke up, instead of trying to soothe him back down in some other way, we fed him. Within two months, he was as terrible a sleeper as Jacob ever was. He wailed every time we put him down, he demanded an increasing number of feedings each night, and everyone’s sleep was getting worse and worse. We night-weaned him (with doctor’s approval) at 4 months, had a great two months, fed him during a growth spurt, and just got through the second round of night-weaning as a result.
With the benefit of a few months’ experimentation behind us, I have the clarity to realize that Jacob and Daniel are exactly the same in terms of their inherent sleep capabilities. Daniel, like Jacob, has a very hard time shutting his body off and will flail around waking himself up. Like Jacob, he gets bored in the crib and doesn’t want to stay there. He likes the world and doesn’t want to shut off to go to sleep. But Daniel is a significantly better sleeper than Jacob was. Not great, by any means! He’s not one of these (mythical?) babies who would ever sleep through the night on his own naturally. But he goes all night without food, his wakings are slowly diminishing over time, he naps in his crib at roughly the same times each day.
And the uncomfortable thing to realize about this is that the difference is us. With Jacob, we relied on him to set the agenda. With Daniel, we’ve come to think that part of our job as parents is to teach him how to fall asleep. So we’ve dealt with some crying, some kissing him and walking out of the room to let him figure things out on his own. And results are preliminary, but I have to say it seems to be working. I have real hope that this time, by 12 months, we really will just be able to read the bedtime stories, kiss him, and close the door knowing that he’ll be able to fall asleep on his own peacefully and get a good night’s rest.
I shudder to think of how many illnesses, how many fights, how many days I sleepwalked through I could have saved myself the first time around. How many, many months of ordinary human function I could have had in Jacob’s first years. But if I focus on the future, I’m just supremely grateful that I don’t have another two years of sleep hell to go through.
Fingers crossed, anyway.
It was astonishing to me how much of a difference it made, to *us*, to nightwean V (and how easy it was when we got around to it, and why didn’t we do that sooner!). But sleep-deprived people are dumb, so I try not to hold it against myself too much.
Not so mythical… Robin is a strange kid in a lot of ways, though. One of his strangenesses is that once he was old enough to be bored by falling asleep/waking up, as soon as we allowed him to have a couple of his favorite music-generators in his crib, he started being VERY easy to put to bed, and able to amuse himself when he woke up for a shockingly long length of time.
On the other hand, he still refuses to walk as anything other than a game. And he hates falling asleep and waking up in the dark. Problems that will hopefully eventually solve themselves…
Oh, I can definitely concur. While our two are fairly different, we actually went through the opposite. E got sleep-trained fairly early, because we could tolerate her wailing. D, on the other hand, was drinking two bottles before bedtime, with some really amazing rituals around getting him to nap, until we finally gave up just a few months ago. He now babbles himself to sleep most nights, but she’s at least passed out. Fortunately for us, he wants to go to sleep about an hour after she does, so by splitting the difference, we win.
I think the best things that have happened to us to help us as parents have been the three day business trip Andy took when #1 was 9 months old and the various times the kids have gotten really bad colds that threw off their routines enough that we could change them. (We have really stubborn kids.) None of those seemed like a good thing at the time.
#1 had gotten to taking 3-4 hours of intervention to fall asleep. When Andy went on his business trip, I just couldn’t do it. After a few hours, I gave up. I had to let her cry. And after two hours, she was asleep. The next night was 30 minutes, then 5. Since then, bedtime has been pretty straight forward. We would never have had the courage to do that until we ran out of options like I did that first evening.
Both kids self-weaned from (bedtime) bottles when they got so sick they couldn’t/didn’t want to suck on them. After two days of no bottle, they didn’t get another one. Neither one complained.
So often, since the kids have been born, I feel like I don’t make the hard choices I *should* make, until I have run out of other, easier but not better, options. Maybe I’ll blame sleep-deprivation too. :)