That glorious glo-worm

We are nuts into 'In the Night Garden' over here. I thought it was ironic that my non-sleeper has gotten so into a preschool show focused on bedtime, until I saw how every show ends. The British narrator says, after the majority of the characters have gone to sleep:

Go to sleep, everybody.
Wait a minute... Somebody's not it bed!
Who's not in bed?
Igglepiggle's not in bed!

This character is probably Nik's hero. How lucky I am to have my own personal Igglepiggle.

I never knew there would come a time in my life where I would read about sleep, think about sleep, have discussions about sleep, formulate opinions about sleep, and otherwise obsess about sleep. That time has come, and it is called motherhood.

Sleeping through the night, or STTN as it is referred to on many online parenting message boards, seems to be regarded as the holy grail of young parenthood, a highly valued and possibly mythical thing. What is more, your child ability to fall and stay asleep with minimal fuss can be treated as some sort of litmus test for good parenting by some people. Annoying people. People I have not felt like talking to for some time. Or at least being honest with.

Don't get me wrong, now. Nik's sleeping has improved most mightily from the days of nine-months old and waking up every 2 hours or less. He usually wakes only once a night now, and sleeps right until morning once a week or so. I tend to start every conversation about Nik's sleep habits with these two facts. Let's focus on how far we've come! Let's not talk about how bedtimes are still a battle, or how he goes to bed later than those annoying people think he should. And I really don't want to talk about the four cavities he has from nursing to sleep and night-nursing... Let me tell you, I felt like a stellar mom after that dentist visit. But when it is a choice between nurse and sleep, or refuse to nurse and listen to screaming... Which would you choose at 2 in the morning?

Aaargh!!!!!!!!!!!

Ahem... *regaining composure* So, yes, sleep. It is a hot topic around here.

Now, Nik is a nursing toddler, and mostly nurses at times related to being asleep. We stopped nursing in public around 15 months, and dropped all daytime nursings between 18 and 20 months, but the nursings around naps and bedtimes? My husband and I were afraid to touch them. If we drop those nursings, he may NEVER SLEEP AGAIN. And then we will NEVER SLEEP AGAIN. We have had enough truly miserable nights to consider those things real possibilities. But I also don't see myself nursing a nine year old, so it was clearly a problem we were going to have to tackle eventually. After Nik's second birthday, we figured, "Here goes..."

Following the example of a LLL friend, we started shortening nursings. Nik would usually fall asleep in my arms after 30 minutes of nursing, so our first target was 25 minutes. Then Andrew would come and get him, and try to put him to sleep anyway he could, as long as it didn't include nursing. The things we tried included, but were not limited to:

• Talking to him
• Not talking to him
• Touching him
• Not touching him
• Holding him
  
• Rocking him
• Leaving him in his crib
• Singing to him
• Humming to him
• Playing him music
• Rubbing his back
• Leaving him to cry for a few minutes *cringe*
• Leaving him to cry for longer than a few minutes *double cringe*
• And finally, some nights, giving up and nursing a frantic, exhausted child just to get this night over with already.

I hate sleep.

But then, one day, we tried giving him that glorious glo-worm.


My mom had bought the glo-worm as a present for Nik just before we took a long plane ride to California when he was a baby. He was never very interested in it, and it had wound up buried in the basement toy box. One day, when I was cleaning up, I came across it again, and Andrew suggested we try it.

That first night that Nik had the glo-worm, he stopped crying and calling for us after less than 10 minutes, and played with it until he fell asleep. After 4-5 days, there was no crying, and just a protest as you walked out the door. After another week, our little "I-hate-to-go-to-bed" boy called out, "Goo-nigh Dad!" as Andrew left the room.

Dear Playskool people,

You rock.

Still, it has not been a cure-all miracle. This last week, Nik has been a little sick, and kicking up more of a fuss when it is time for bed than he was before. And he has also gotten to the point where it seems like he doesn't need a nap everyday anymore, so we are trying to figure out some new schedule around that.

Oh, well. Solve one problem, two more crop up. To borrow a phrase from "Night Garden": Tombliboo, ombliboo, that's how it goes.

The risk of reading too much

What a funny little parenting trajectory I have been on. Getting pregnant as a twenty-something career women, I did everything I thought I was supposed to. Attended all my appointments with my GP, switched to OB-GYN visits in the seventh month, bought everything the baby magazines told me I needed, had a lousy hospital birth experience, and took home my struggling-to-nurse newborn son 36 hours after he was born. I planned to care for him "by the book", and expected to be pretty much like the other young parents I knew, with the exception, of course, that my child would be just a little smarter, better adjusted and more well-behaved then their children were. I never anticipated morphing into the mother I am today.

So, to borrow a line from Talking Heads, well, how did I get here? And I think it all started when my son was about 2 months old, and decided sleep is for the weak. (Thanks to amberjee at
http://sleepisfortheweak.wordpress.com/ for bringing humour to this most debilitating of parenting dilemmas). At first, I thought it would pass. It didn't. Then, we tried on that much debated practice of having him "cry it out". And when I said we tried, I mean, for about 5 minutes one desperate night. I can't even pretend we had the stomach for it.

But, I believe in research, right? I figured the answer to this problem is in a book somewhere. Or on the Internet. And I, resident research queen, will find it. What I was really looking for was something to convince me that leaving him to "cry-it-out" was really the best for everyone concerned. If I could just find an argument convincing enough to quell my guilt, I could silence my inner sobbing mama, and muscle through it. But I never found that book or article. Instead, I found increasingly convincing books and articles outlining why I shouldn't do it. Pleading with me, even. Begging me to listen to that inner mama, for my child's sake. And that, folks, was the beginning of my descent into granola land.

The first book I read on the subject was The Baby Sleep Book by Dr. William Sears. Prior to picking up the pink book with the adorable sleeping infant on the cover (the infant I wanted to have living in my house), I had never even heard of the infamous Dr. Sears. Now I could probably tell you everything you never wanted to know about him. Other sleep books that pulled me further into the land of gentle parenting were The No-cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley, and Sleepless in America by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka.

And I didn't stop with sleep books. I couldn't! Because these books told me more than how to cope with disturbed sleep. They told me that they believed in my ability to parent. That there was something inside a parent that was superior to empirical research. That it was okay to make my choices from the heart.

For someone who works in a VERY research-based, empirical field, reading these books felt like indulgence in contraband. It was like flirting with the enemy, and I couldn't get enough. So I read more titles from Pantley, Kurcinka and Sears. I added in titles published by La Leche League, and started attending local meetings, where I found more books to read. I read Good Nights by Dr. Jay Gordon, and lost my guilt over co-sleeping. I read The Natural Baby by Janet Balaskas, which helped to normalize breastfeeding, night waking, baby wearing, and responsive parenting. And when I read Lu Hannessian's Let the Baby Drive, the validation high lasted for weeks.

It has not been a perfectly smooth ride, mind you. In my previous post, Fear of a unique path, I described my difficulties in knowing how far to walk along this road, how to decide what is me, and what is just conforming to the alternative crowd. I still do not buy organic, my son is vaccinated, we have plastic toys. But I am much further from the mainstream then I would have guessed 2 years ago. We are still nursing, we cloth diaper, we co-sleep on and off... And it all started with sleepless nights, and the local library. Be careful what you read, my friends. Ideas are powerful things.