Sleeping Babes

My sister-in-law has two kids, both of whom are great sleepers. She joked that her first was sleeping through the night by the time she was two weeks old. Her second, a little boy, took a bit longer, but not by much relatively speaking. When we visited back in February, we noticed that he would nod off while having his bottle. She would have to wake him to get him to finish the bottle, which only served to annoy him. He and his sister would then sleep through the night, regardless of ambient noise or light. It was marvelous to watch!


© Photographer: Brebca | Agency: Dreamstime.com

MetaBaby is nothing like his cousins. For the first 6 weeks, we were lucky if we got him to sleep before 6AM. We would both stay up trying anything and everything to get him to go to sleep. If he fell asleep, it was usually on top of one of us. 

Out of desperation, we tried co-sleeping and found that it worked really well for us. If he woke up in the course of the night, I could nurse him back to sleep without getting up.  This was a definite benefit given that I was still tender from my c-section, and I was dealing with a pretty bad case of mastitis.

After a few months of peace, the co-sleeping stopped working.  I realized that I was nursing him every time he woke up, but I started to suspect he didn't need it.  Additionally, he started moving and kicking more in his sleep, which was becoming annoying.  We moved him to his crib, but kept him in our room.  Though he woke occasionally, I didn't nurse him every time, so he was able to put himself back to sleep.  It was a good balance at the time.

But everything wears thin at some point, right?  The occasional wake-ups started taking a toll on our sleep, so we moved him to his room.  We (or was it me) resisted moving him  because we (I) thought we'd (I'd) miss his little baby breaths...but it turns out that what we really missed was sleep.  He still wakes up once a night, but sometimes...he doesn't!  Oh, those nights are good.