Writen by Jennie Crawford
I am the mother of two small children. They are now age six and age four. When I think back to them being infants, the first thing I always think of ( besides of course how absolutely adorable they were) is how overwhelmingly TIRED I was. I can remember day dreaming about the day that they would each sleep through the night. I can remember reading about sleep patterns and that babies couldn't sleep through the might until they weighed 10 pounds. So I would wait for that magical 10 pounds weigh in at the doctors. Still, they wouldn't sleep all night.
I would lie with them after giving them their bottle and wonder if I was the only one awake on our block. I would think-there must be a way. I READ about babies sleeping through the night, why can't I have one? Am I doing something wrong? Should I let them cry it out? Can I really let them cry it out? Won't they think their mommy doesn't love them? In my mind, I know babies aren't capable of such thoughts, but when you are a sleep deprived mom at 3am listening to your baby cry, the urge to go to your child is overwhelming no matter now tired you are.
When I had my second child, 23 months after the first, I thought that things would be better. Surely it was just my inexperience as a mom. Now I know what I'm doing, I won't be so nervous and I bet this one will sleep through the night a lot faster. Mind you, my daughter, now almost two years old, still wasn't consistently sleeping through the night. She would sleep all night more often then not, but she did wake up often enough that we couldn't say she had mastered the all night sleep skill.
My son slept worse. He was almost one year old before he slept that magical 5-hour time span that the experts claim means they have slept through the night. Five hours is not sleeping all night to me, but I would have jumped at it at this point in my two ½ years of NOT sleeping through the night.
Is there an answer to the sleep all night problem? I don't know for sure. I know that nothing I tried ever worked consistently. I will admit to giving up perhaps too soon with each method and then moving onto the next because I was so impatient. I wanted my children to sleep so I could. I somehow accomplished quite the opposite. If I could do it over, I think I would pick a method I believed I could follow consistently and stick with it. I may have been lucky enough to get my kids to sleep through the night much earlier had I done so.
Jennie Crawford is the stay at home mom of two small children. For more sleepytime secrets, visit http://www.jenniecrawford.com/sleepytimesecrets |
0 comments:
Post a Comment