The Great Sleep Debate

Newborn Kaylee Sleeping

I slept like a baby.

Anyone who says this isn't a parent. When it comes to babies there are a lot of misconceptions. I read every book and announced myself ready for parenthood.

Those books are only slightly helpful. The real world experience of your own baby is the only true way to understand.

So here was one of my huge misconceptions regarding becoming a parent. I thought babies would just sleep when they're suppose to. At night. No one informed me, not even one of those books, that babies have to be trained to do everything we consider part of normal life. Things like sleeping and eating at certain times aren't instinctual and if we want 8 hours of sleep we better teach our babies how to sleep.

Once we got past the harrowing experience of having to get our daughter up every 2 hours to feed her due to low birth weight we finally had to take that step into teaching her how to sleep. With my daughter it was fairly easy. That's probably because at 3 months old I started putting her into her crib while she was only partly asleep. By the time she was 6 months old she was sleeping great and I couldn't understand what everyone was complaining about.

That obviously didn't last or I wouldn't be here writing this blog article.

Around 7 or 8 months her sleeping got messed up. I'm not going to say how or why, it just did and all of the sudden she needed to held and rocked to sleep. She would then wake up in the middle of the night constantly and want to play. She had to be entertained for at least 4 hours before she'd go back to sleep, she had to again be rocked or held until she fell asleep. I tried to retrain her sleeping. I tried every book I read over the next year. Cry it out, the no cry sleep solution. Nothing would work and I was at this point operating on no more than 3 hours of sleep at a time. After a year that's pretty serious. I finally understood. I began to think my child hated me and was trying an insane torture method on me.

At 1.5 to 2 years Kaylee was having issues with fever. She'd run 105's with no sign of a virus pretty much every 2 months for at least a few days. During one of these I put the air bed in the living room, laid down on it with her and went to sleep with her. Was I surprised when we woke up 8 hours later with the sun streaming in on our faces. We had slept through the night and her fever was broken. I decided to go against everything I believed in and set that bed up in her room and started sleeping with her. I told no one. I was embarrassed because I was co-sleeping. But after a year of no sleep you'll do anything. I was ready to dance naked in front of a bonfire of cooked hams if someone told me it would work.

So co-sleeping it was. Every night at 8pm I would lay down with her and we'd go to sleep. I was so exhausted at first that this was okay and I was happy to get the 12 hours of sleep. But eventually I wanted to sleep in my own bed sometimes and didn't want to actually fall asleep with her. That was around 2 years old. She of course protested this and I was now in the spot that is the reason you don't co-sleep. My daughter couldn't sleep if I wasn't in bed with her.

Before you get scared I will tell you that she now sleeps peacefully in her bed through the night and goes to sleep on her own. How I got there is the hardest part.

It took a year. Maybe it would have taken less time but I occasionally felt my new method wasn't working so I had would try something new and then have to start all over. Or something else would happen that would set me back to the beginning. So how did I do it?

It sounds easy, but it wasn't. I started with laying in the bed with her with my arm around her (the only way she would go to sleep). I explained that I was going to leave once she was asleep and would come back and sleep with her later. It took about a week for her to stop coming out and looking for me, but it worked! This all happened in bi-weekly increments (accept when I had to go backwards). Rushing never worked and sometimes I'd try to move to the next week only to find that she wasn't ready yet and had to go back.

So here's the list of what step I took every few weeks: Laying beside her touching her, laying beside her not touching, sitting beside her, sitting beside the bed, standing beside the bed, standing at the door, standing outside her door with it open and finally standing outside her door with it closed. We of course also developed a bedtime routine that was never deviated from and took an hour. She'd watch Blue's Clues, brush her teeth, I'd sing her a song and read a book. Kisses and hugs.

This bedtime routine has since been shortened. She now gets to choose books & songs or Blue's Clues. But it is still the same. She sleeps through the night, from 8pm until the sun comes up (that's the rule that she knows). I've had to be very strict about sharing my bed and getting up at night. She gets hugs and kisses for staying in her bed all night and she loses a toy if she gets up at night (accept special circumstances like nightmares, potty breaks and illness).

So I created my own sleep training. It was a bit of a combination of Cry it Out and The No Cry Sleep Solution. Do I think that going to co-sleeking was a bad idea? Yes. Would I do it again if I was in this situation. Absolutely, I would not hesitate for a second. Don't be ashamed if you have to do things like that just to get some sleep. I wasn't able to fix my daughter's sleep problems because I was so deprived of sleep. I could barely move during the day and was a bad parent because of all those problems.

The number one rule I've learned through accidental parenting is this; Who cares what others think and do what you have to. If you have to co-sleep then do it. If you have to use formula then do it. It's not a failure. It's not even a setback. It's just not parenting the way you thought you would.