On Sleeping. And Not Sleeping.

Ellie, around 18 months.

We've finally had it. It's time to get our baby to sleep more than a few hours at a time during the night.

I remember when Hazel was around a year old, and a friend told us his one-year old was still waking up several times a night. Michael and I had a lot of pity for him. That just sounded awful. We had been blessed with not one, but two great sleepers who had begun sleeping through the night from a few months old.

Hazel, around a year old.

Granted, we assumed a big part of that was what we had done. We worked hard with each of them. We "sleep trained" them. When we heard stories of babies not sleeping through the night, not only could we not relate, but we assumed that there must have been something they were doing wrong different than us, that it was simply a matter of figuring out the right method. I spent several months of their lives stressed and worried and bogged down by sleeping methods.

And then Ruby was born.

She has had nights when she slept through the night, but everything changed when we stopped swaddling her. Also, she took a pacifier for less than a week, and then dropped it like a bad habit.

During the last year, she's had a few miraculous nights where she suddenly decided to sleep all night. Often it is when we're on vacation or in a hotel room together. Coincidence or not, I have no idea.

I've become her pacifier. There's a term I read in a parenting book, "accidental parenting," that refers to things parents do in the moment to appease a situation that is intended as temporary, but becomes a new habit to break. This happened with Hazel when she weaned from her pacifier. She had always been content to lay down and fall asleep within five minutes with her pacifier. When we dropped the pacifier, she was so mad that I decided to pick her up and rock her to soothe her. One or two days of this turned into more than a year of needing to rock her and hold her in order for her to take a nap. (Luckily this only applied to naps. At bedtime she could sleep without this ritual. And this isn't to say that it was all bad. I mostly relished my special nap times with Hazel, especially with the guilt that I was sending her to daycare so young. Accidental parenting and guilt are closely related, I'd say.)

Accidental parenting. All the intentional things I did with my first two that I accredit to them being good sleepers went out the window with Ruby. I didn't have a "start time" every day which I based the rest of the daily schedule on. I eventually started nursing her to sleep before almost every bedtime and nap, a cardinal sin with sleep training methods. I was much less tolerant of any crying in the night. Her not taking a pacifier changed the way we did a lot of things.

And so, here we are with a one-year old who still wakes me up at least once a night, often more these days with teething and mostly habit.

We may have still been correct before. That is to say, I did things to encourage Ruby to continue waking up, so at least in part I know it's my fault that she's not as good of a sleeper. I know this isn't universal, as we've known people to try everything in the world, and still the baby wakes up. I firmly believe now, three kids later, that luck is much more at the center of getting a baby to sleep all night. The baby's personality and temperament make a big difference, maybe all the difference.

She's our third baby, and the last, and I haven't cared nearly as much. I've even embraced the late night feedings, knowing the End of All Things Baby is in the near future. Until lately. Now I'm just tired of being tired and sick of being sick. And I know there are at least some things we can do to help her figure this whole sleeping-through-the-night thing out.

Last night Ruby got her first real taste of self-soothing. Hopefully over the next few nights she will figure out she doesn't need to nurse every few hours. And we'll all sleep better.

I've learned some humility. I knew our confidence (cockiness?) that came with two good sleepers could come to an end with a not-so-great sleeper. I can accept that. I have much more empathy and can relate to a lot more parents than I ever could before.

My husband can fall asleep anywhere.

Now I just want a good night's sleep. It doesn't even have to be great. More than a few hours in a row would be fantastic.