Thursday, April 2, 2009

Sleepy

We are 'sleep training' Jack right now.

I use the term loosely because I think it's more us being 'trained' than him. It's funny, before I had a kid I thought I was an expert on child-rearing. I just figured if you were firm but fair and followed through, your kid would do what you wanted. Oh how naive I was. I may only be five months into this parenting gig but my world has been blown away with what I've learned about babies and their opinions.

My child has opinions; lot's of them.

Anyway, back to the sleep training. Basically, Jack is large and in charge at nearly 20 pounds, and there are a couple of nearly 1-year-olds we know who weigh about the same and sleep consistently through the night. So, I don't think it's a nutritional need in the middle of the night, if anything, it's habit. He wakes up at the same time every night no matter what time he goes to bed.

The hard thing about getting him to drop his middle of the night feed is that he isn't a baby that can be soothed with rocking or snuggling especially when he is mostly asleep anyway. When we go into him it seems to wake him up more and then it really pisses him off when no boob is offered.

So, we just lay in bed, gripping the blankets, trying to keep ourselves out of his room while he works it out. Not fun. Granted it's almost never more than 10 minutes, but at 1am, ten minutes kind of feels like an eternity.

Last night he slept until 6am with no crying. Hopefully I didn't just jinx myself by talking about it on the Internet.

1 comment:

amanda said...

haha! I'm superstitious about talking about that stuff too. When is Jack's b-day... I have a Jack (he's almost 3) but Teddy is 5 months too.

Do you read the baby whisperer... supposedly if you wake them before their typical wake-up, it'll break them of it. Although I never try it because the last thing I would consider doing is setting my alarm to wake up any other time than when I absolutely have to.