there’s always another hurdle to cross

Shh!  I’m going to mention something that I’m afraid to say, for fear that I will jinx it.  (Not that I actually believe in jinxes, but you know what I mean.)

Curious J is getting very close to sleeping through the night.

It started a week ago when I took her to her follow-up doctor visit to check on the status of her ear infections.  Both ears looked perfectly normal, and she was given a clean bill of health.  So that night, when she woke up two hours after being put to bed, and after I checked on her and nursed her a bit and put her back down, and then she woke up and cried again — I left her alone.  She wailed for 45 minutes, but I didn’t go to her.  She woke up periodically for the next few hours, wailing for a few minutes.  I left her alone, and each time she went back to sleep.  Similar situations have happened previous nights, although I have now stopped going in altogether.  She starts waking up and crying about one to two hours after I put her to bed, and I’m not doing a thing about it.  She usually stops around midnight, and then proceeds to deeply sleep for quite a few hours.

This is a big deal for me.  It’s not that I’m against letting babies “cry it out,” meaning cry themselves to sleep.  I’m against using “cry it out” on very young babies, but I’m not against it in general.  I used it with Lyd when she was 5-6 months old, it took 3 nights, it worked beautifully, and she’s been a fantastic sleeper ever since.  But I could never quite use it with Curious J in the middle of the night because she always seemed to be sick.  She would cry and cry — and start to cough.  The coughing can be a sign of bronchiolitis, something she’s always struggled with, and what mother can ignore her baby when the baby might possibly be having a hard time breathing?  Plus, on the few nights when I DID try to let her cry, inevitably she’d come down with a snotty head cold the next day, and then I felt like a bad mother for ignoring my baby and making her cold worse.

When you feel your baby might be sick, and when she truly IS sick a lot of the time, it’s really, really hard to let your baby cry, even though you know that by getting up and going to her all the time, you are perpetuating a problem that’s probably not going to go away any time soon.

With all that in mind, as I listened to J wail in her crib a week ago, I decided to try again.  I knew J was healthy, I knew that she had gotten into some bad nighttime habits while my brother was here, and I figured that there was no better time than now to try again to get her sleeping through the night.  It was a new year, I was tired of being tired, and … whatever, It’s Time.

To my relief, it’s been going surprisingly well!  There has been crying, but there hasn’t been any worrisome coughing, and she hasn’t gotten sick.  Most nights she still wakes up once in the wee small hours of the morning, but last night she didn’t wake up until 6:15 a.m., at which time I got up, changed and fed her, and put her back to bed, where she fell right back to sleep without a peep.  Most mornings she’s been frequently sleeping until 8, even 9 a.m.  Concurrent with this new nighttime sleep, she’s only taking one good nap in the afternoon lasting about an hour and half.  I wish it were a bit longer, but the good nighttime sleep is worth it.

It tentatively seems that one parenting hurdle may have been crossed!  I’m sure there will be some setbacks; life is never perfect.  However, I feel that good progress is being made.  2009 is shaping up to be a better year in the sleep department.  However, even as one parenting hurdle is being crossed, another hurdle looms on the horizon.

I previously mentioned the fun I had this past weekend teaching Curious J to hold her own sippy cup and bottle.  I think we may have conquered this battle, although she holds her bottle in a really weird way.  But, hey, it gets the job done.  However, I realized tonight that we have another parenting hurdle to cross, that of getting her to eat her food without needing to be entertained and distracted.  She’s got to learn to eat the food I feed her without fussing.

I have a plan for how to do this, and I’m confident it will work, but I’m equally sure that there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth involved in the process.  It needs to be done, and frankly it needs to be done sooner rather than later, but boy, this is not going to be fun.

My friend has a daughter the same age as Curious J, and last weekend she and I were talking about how we are realizing that we each have to stop viewing our second child as a baby.  Since our firstborns and our secondborns are 4 years apart, the difference between the two is obvious.  Our older ones are completely not babies anymore, which makes it hard to see the younger one as anything BUT a baby!  But, our “babies” are rapidly becoming less of babies everyday, and we’re realizing that we have to start teaching our babies and disciplining our babies and … not treating them like babies anymore.

For me personally, I’m realizing that Curious J is definitely NOT a baby anymore.  For all that she still sleeps in a crib, still nurses, and still doesn’t talk, she is a determined toddler, and I need to start parenting her appropriately.  It’s strange to arrive at that realization; my baby isn’t a baby anymore.

And, of course, it leaves me saying the age-old phrase, “Time goes so fast!  It was just yesterday when she was so small!”  I guess that’s part of being a mother, too.  We watch our children grow and change, and we have to grow and change with them.  Which leads to the other age-old phrase, “Enjoy them while they’re young – these days will be over before you know it!”

I’m realizing the truth of those words more everyday.  And despite the hurdles to cross, I AM enjoying my parenting of both of my daughters.  They are wonderful, unique individuals, completely unlike each other in many ways, but I love them both dearly.  I’m glad to be their mother, glad to help them cross these hurdles, and I thank God every day for the chance to raise these two girls.