>Sleep Training – Not Just For Babies!

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I’ve been online and interacting with other virtual parents since Tony and I discovered we were pregnant with Bear. Whether my online contact with other parents has been in the birth clubs on Babycenter or through reading others’ blogs, the advice and the messages are the same: Parents are opinionated about the right way to do something.

Particularly when it comes to sleep and babies. Anyone who’s been around a newborn understands how wrong the “sleep like a baby” moniker is. Babies don’t sleep well. They cluster feed, they catnap during the day and stay up for hours in the middle of the night. My babies didn’t learn to reliably sleep through the night until their second birthdays.

There are a lot of books out there that have the magic cure, but the methods of BabyWise, the Ferber method, and even The No-Cry Sleep Solution (to name a very few) just weren’t right for us. I believed then, as I still believe now, that the best way for me and for my children is to let sleep happen when it will.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not laissez-faire about the importance of sleep. I schedule Bug’s naptimes, and I plan my daily activities around his naps. I did the same with Bear; although their naptimes are nearly as much of a break for me as for them, I have witnessed over and over again how essential a good nap during the day is to quality sleep later that night. Tony and I have regular bedtime routines with them; though we struggle to get them both in bed and asleep by 8pm at night, we nearly always have that task accomplished by 9. Reorganizing our life to better suit their sleep needs wasn’t something we ever questioned; it was just what we did.

In that vein, allowing them to co-sleep with us, nursing them through the night until Bear was nine months old and Bug was over a year, letting them stay up past their bedtimes on the nights when they just weren’t tired… it’s all part of our parenting method. Getting them to sleep through the night has always been Tony’s and my biggest parenting challenge; it’s the aspect that we’ve struggled with the most.

Bear’s a great sleeper now, but for the first two years of her life she slept fitfully, alternating between her crib and our bed. When we moved into our house in Colorado she began sleeping through the night every night; I can count on one hand the number of times she’s awoken to sleep in our bed with us since then. This is why I’m not terribly concerned that Bug isn’t completely consistent yet. We’ve been through this before and it ended well, so we believe (perhaps mistakenly) that he’ll go the way of his older sister. That eventually he’ll sleep through the night in his bed every night.

So for us, sleep training was never really an option we wanted to explore. It wasn’t right for us, nor did we feel it was right for our critters. I do, however, believe in sleep training for husbands.

It began when we got Maggie. For some reason, her bladder couldn’t hold its contents throughout an entire night until she was close to the one year mark; every night she’d whine at us to let her outside in the wee hours of the night. She learned quickly that coming to my side of the bed would result in greeting my back, and after just a couple weeks she always woke up Tony instead. She – and I – had trained him for this job. It was great preparation for when we had Bear, and now Bug.

I didn’t pump bottles of breastmilk for middle-of-the-night feedings, nor would either of my critters take formula. This meant that the three and four times a night they woke up to nurse, I was the one waking up with them. With Bear we always put her to bed in her crib at night, and I would go into her room to nurse her before I went to sleep myself. All subsequent feedings after that, though, saw Tony getting up to fetch her from her crib, and putting her back when she’d finished. (It’s why she often stayed in our bed after that 3am feeding until we woke for the day.)

In the year and some months after she no longer nursed at night but still woke up to join us in our bed, Tony was always the one to go to her in the dark; either to soothe her back to sleep or to bring her into our bed. The tradition continues to this day. Bug slept in our bed with us until we moved into our home here on Okinawa, but has joined us in our bed at least three nights each week. Though we took the side off his crib about a month ago, the critters sleep with the door to their room closed, with a childproof knob to keep him from leaving his room. Which means when he wakes up at o’dark:thirty, Tony’s the one who gets up from our bed to bring him to ours.

It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even hear Bug crying at night anymore. I no longer reach over to touch Tony on the arm and ask, “Honey, will you go get him?” because it’s automatic. Tony just does it. On more than one recent occasion I’ve woken in the morning to find Bug sleeping sprawled out next to me, and absolutely no recollection of him waking or joining us.

This began at first out of my insistence that just because I was in charge of feeding our babies did not mean in any way that Tony was off the hook in any other department. He changed all their diapers; he burped them between breasts; he was and still is in charge of directing food into their mouths at dinnertime. If I was awake to nurse our children, then I was determined that he would understand that I was awake to feed our children. (I’m sweet like that.) That he wouldn’t be allowed to say, “Oh yeah, of course she sleeps through the night” the same way he told people that I never experienced morning sickness in my pregnancy with Bear. Just because he wasn’t home to see me vomit didn’t mean it didn’t happen every single morning before I left for work in my first trimester, and sometimes before going to bed at night, too.

I was determined that my sleeplessness would be shared by both of us, but it ended up working well for our situation. See, I’m a light sleeper. If I wake up in the middle of the night – to do something even so simple as using the bathroom – there’s a very good chance that I won’t fall back asleep for hours. Tony, on the other hand, can fall asleep anywhere, anytime. For him to get up and bring a crying child into our bed, then fall back asleep the moment he touches his head to his pillow is a given. He hardly even remembers waking up, much less the carrying of that child in his arms. His sleep is hardly interrupted.

It might not be preferable; of course I would wish that Bug would learn to sleep through the night on his own. But until he does, he and I both have Tony trained to get him. Works for me; works for Bug. As for Tony… well, he doesn’t even remember getting up, so I’m thinking that really, it works for him, too. (And until he hops on here to read what I’ve written and corrects me, that will remain the official party line.)

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