Sleeping Babies & Snobby Parents

as i sit here watching my exhausted boys refuse to nap, i am left pondering the politics of getting your kid to sleep. a disclaimer: if your precious little angel sleeps through the night & you are convinced that its all due to your stellar parenting, please quit reading NOW.

for the rest of us sleep deprived parents, ever notice how snobby people are about their sleeping babies? i am firmly convinced that having a child who sleeps through the night before age 2 (i mean ALL the way through... not just 5 hrs at a stretch) is largely due to luck & nothing more. N & i are not high stress parents, we don't always rock or feed the boys to sleep; we roll with whatever their needs seem to be on any given night. they just aren't & never have been, "good" sleepers. more personal evidence that its all luck: my family tends to have lots of kids, & within each nuclear family, there is a consistent mix of "good" & "bad" sleepers. it's really just luck folks, & maybe genetics. it's not bc you never rocked your baby to sleep, or always rocked your baby to sleep, or give them a bottle at night, or breastfed until they were 3. you just got lucky. i wish people would bear that in mind before launching into a "how to get your child to sleep" monologue. every kid is different, & there is not a one size fits all solution.

& while i'm on the topic of sleep, has anyone else noticed how judgemental folks get when you say you don't buy the "cry it out" philosophy? i hate how CIO is considered by so many to be the gold standard of sleep techniques. (if you have been drinking the koolaid, calm down, i'm not knocking your parenting. its a choice every family makes for themselves.) in my mind however, i just don't think it is a productive means of teaching a baby to go to sleep. i don't believe that babies have the capacity to calm themselves when they're so young, & i don't believe that babies have the cognitive ability to understand why they are being left to cry. of course, left to sob long enough, any child will eventually pass out. 1) they exhaust themselves, & 2) its a baby's natural response to a traumatic situation. (any NICU parent can tell you, after traumatic procedures docs often expect your baby to pass out. remember that sleeping little boy handed to you after his circumcision? yeah, that's why. babies can't control their circumstances, so its a defense mechanism when they can't handle whats going on around them--i can't tell you how many times this was explained to N after boys had ultrasounds & scans & x-rays, & tubes put in, etc. but it is still unsettling to see.) in any case, i fail to see how leaving a child to scream teaches that child to put himself to sleep.

how then do we get our boys to sleep? we do whatever they need-- we'll cuddle, or rock, or rub their back, or get a bottle, until they put themselves out. i have to be honest, we don't have alot of trouble getting them down at night. they go out pretty easily betwen 6-7pm every night.
our trouble is the day time sleep. we wake up once at night to eat (they're hungry, this is totally fine with me), but around 4-5am everyday, we start a pattern of restless sleep, where they are obviously still tired, but need alot of help to stay asleep. this means i am usually awake the entire time, until they get up for good around 7-8am. i think this is bc N gets up at 5 when he works, & refuses to turn down his alarm, so the noise & his subsequent rustling around wake them up enough that they think it's daytime. i'm debating moving myself & the boys upstairs (our master bedroom is on the ground floor, the boys' room is upstairs, far away.) i know N will hate the idea, & it will mean i handle nighttime feedings solo, but we need to do something about the sleep situation, bc its just not working for a preggo & exhausted mom, not to mention the little dudes.

& they are AWFUL nappers. they are difficult to get to sleep, & even harder to keep asleep. if their combined naps for the day total 1 hr, we're lucky. they just aren't getting enough sleep & i know it. we're trying a new regime, where we do a "nightnight" routine before naps (when i see them getting tired) & i'm back to letting them sleep in their swings, since at this point all i want is to get them in the pattern of napping. as i type, we are in the bedroom, val has just fallen asleep in his swing & conrad, who is truly exhausted, is fighting it. hard. wish us luck.