reaching my limits…

[Anonymous]

Big HUGS to my favourite sleep-deprived-reflux mamas! We will get through this together and one day (soon, I hope) will sleep again!

[Anonymous]

The update: last night he slept from 9:15 til 10:30 when he fell out of bed(yikes!) but I put him back in and he was asleep before I left teh room, and then slept until 6 am. Something is DEFINITELY happening around here. And this is what’s going on while cutting a tooth, too. I’m just waiting for it to fall apart due to teething, but I’m enjoying the sleep so far! In two days it will be three weeks with our “Nazi sleep training” as I like to jokingly call it.

Tiffany,

I’m so sorry to hear about your situation…..like Lori and us, and I’m sure a few others out there, babyhood has been anything BUT what I thought it would be like. I have somehow retained some shred of hope along the way, each time things got a bit better from some hairbrained idea of mine …(like when I took out gluten and I thought dh was ready to go over the edge– but then it WORKED and I had him apologizing for thinking I was out of my mind )….Anyway, this sleep experience these last few weeks has been that way again. You finally reach the end of your newly lengthened rope and hope seems to run out and RIGHT when you think it’s gone, suddenly you turn a corner and there’s a new glimmer of it again.

I understand what you mean about the marriage bit, too. In my case, my husband works and has worked very strange shifts our whole marriage, including night shifts (he’s a police sergeant) and every other sort of shift, so we had to deal with not sleeping together at night quite often and that made it much easier in every way to deal with this loss of sleeping next to one another since Lucas was born– he’s been patient but I’d be lying if I said he hasn’t made more than his fair share of jabs about not sleeping in our room. I can only say that this (the recent new sleeping arrangement and sleep “training”) experience has helped me to let go a little bit and to realize that sometimes he might wake up from reflux and I am still going to him each time he wakes in the night, I’m just not staying there and it’s just now becoming worth all the effort to get him to sleep alone. In my opinion, the longer you continue an arrangement like this (sleeping together), the harder it is to change it. I am speaking, obviously, from experience! Lucas’ best line so many nights when Ryan came into say goodnight was “Daddy go sleep in Daddy’s room, Mama stay with me.” The bigger they are and the more cognitive they become, the more this is the norm for them (he literally thought my bed was with him and Ryan’s was alone…and why wouldn’t he think that?) and more difficult it is to change behavior. that in itself obviously isn’t a reason to change your current status, but it is something to think about. I was only ready to do this VERY recently. It’s like I had this store of patience and it literally ran out. Very suddenly I decided — this HAS to change and I’m willing to have some tears in order to do it. So….food for thought. Keep us posted as to what’s going on and we can atleast be supportive through it like these gals have been for me.

You may also want to be strategic and plan this for beginning over a long weekend or during some time off or sometime when you can loose some extra sleep and it’ll be alright (it’s never alright, but you know what I mean with work and all). Or have someone help out like a mother, sister, etc. who can be there (and not be judgemental) and help so you with housechores or caregiving for the child after work while you get a catnap or something. I don’t know, just brainstorming thoughts…

[Anonymous]

Anne, I’m so glad to hear that things are going well. It scares me to think that it can take this long (or even longer) to get things on track. Hailey’s NEW room is right beside Sarah’s, and I don’t know how Sarah will sleep through it, even with the white noise.

[Anonymous]

I’m not in the same situation as the both of you, but I do have an older child whose room is right next door to Ben’s. And I was so worried about how she would sleep with him crying all night. She did wake up a few times at the beginning, but now she sleeps right though it. I think they just get used to it.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Naomi! If Sarah can sleep through it I’ll be thrilled (and very surprised- in a good way).

[Anonymous]

I think siblings do adapt. Liza is in the same room as Ellie and she rarely wakes up when Ellie has a nightmare and cries. If she does wake up she usually just rolls over and goes back to sleep. And neither of the girls usually wake up when Myles cries at night.

[Anonymous]

Hi guys,

Just wanted to post and say that with five weeks under our belts, Lucas is regularly sleeping 8-10 hour stretches. It took until about the third week to really see the wakings consistantly dropping down in frequency. Dh and I even went away for the first time since he was born (this was planned way in advance and was only coincidental that I had begun the new sleep regimen beforehand) and he slept great for my MIL.

So, in hindsight, it seems that once I felt the wakings weren’t all reflux related and once I was ready to teach him to “go” to sleep on his own….presto! (Well, not exactly presto….more like two difficult weeks with losing a LOT of sleep, and another two of steady improvement). Looking back, I think I could have tried this around age two, when he’d been gluten free for several months and was able to sleep four hour stretches much easier. I also weaned him at 2 yrs old and that might have been a great time to just switch EVERYthing around, but I was too chicken to rock the boat that much. I just want Lori and everyone else with severe sleep issues to take this to heart….there IS HOPE OUT THERE!!! Even with hiatal hernias, even with severe protein intolerances or possibly celiac (he tested negative but Christine tells me the tests are unreliable until age 3!), even with a history of never sleeping more than 3-4 hour stretches….even with 2 years of co-sleeping with mommy and nursing on and off all night long, IT IS POSSIBLE TO GET YOUR CHILD TO SLEEP FOR THE NIGHT IN THEIR OWN BED.

Some other issues that came up, Lori: he regressed in other areas which I was told would probably happen. He was going pee on the pottie several times a day, that went out the window. He began crying when I left him at school– which he’d never really done before– and became very clingy especially the first two weeks of this new regimen. The separation anxiety has since stopped, but we are still trying to get comfortable with doing the pottie thing again. The other thing I did was try to get the naps to be as good as possible, so I cancelled a lot of plans and we missed a lot of his pre-school– which is in the afternoons two times a week. It seemed that the better naps he took, the better his nighttime sleep was and I needed the sleep to get maximized during our big shift with everything.

So, we did the whole hold-his-hand-sit-on-the-edge-of-the-bed, and then gradually moved out of the room. It took me nearly four weeks to get my chair on the hallway side of his bedroom door. Now, I tell him that I need to check on teh dog, or do something in teh other room and that I’ll check on him. Sometimes he still wants me to hold his hand — he’ll say “Mama hold my hand a lot” when I ask him if he wants me to hold his hand for a minute– but I’ll just do a minute or so and while he’s still awake leave the room.

Another warning, maybe I’m just some sort of freak, but for the first ten days of sleeping well (normal nighttime long stretches) I was a zombie. It’s like I was sleeping too much or felt like I was in a coma after waking up. I also wondered if my body was physically hoarding the sleep, like feeling tired so that I would sleep as much as possible while the opportunity presented itself. Almost like a survival mechanism? I was so tired and taking naps and sleeping lots of hours at night compared to my last 2.5 years! Now I seem to have come out of that as well.

Let me know if you’ve started anything with Hailey, yet. Does she turn two soon? And to the others in similar shoes….hang in there!!!!

[Anonymous]

I forgot to mention that we also found he was reacting to a kids toothpaste, I can’t remember the brand– how bad is that– but it had Mater from the Cars movie on the front. We stopped using it after I read another mom on here having trouble with a toothpaste. The ingrediant list didn’t show any of the things he traditionally has trouble with, but did list several things that he never normally has, like whatever chemical things are in a lot of toothpaste. Anyways, I stopped using it for the beginning of our new sleeping regimen and the night before Dh and I left town to go away, he used it and Lucas woke up four times. He haden’t had that many wakings in about two weeks at that point. I let dh really have it as we left town, and we threw the toothpaste away so no one would get confused about using it.

For what it’s worth, the toothpaste we are using now and have been using since starting our new sleeping arrengements is called: Orajel Toddler Training toothpaste and has thomas the train on the front.

[Anonymous]

Anne,

I’m so happy that Lucas is now sleeping through the night. You sure did a great job with the sleep training and I know your experience will help others who are struggling.

Gret job! And thanks for the update.

[Anonymous]

UGH!… I just lost a long reply! I’ll have to keep this on the short side since the kids are getting impatient..

Thanks so much for the update! I’m so happy to hear the great news and have been thinking about you often.

We haven’t tried any formal sleep training, but have been trying to get Hailey used to sleeping in our bed. Once she’s used to sleeping flat (because she used her comfy lift bed) then I plan on moving her to her own room. I have just started cutting out her night bottle and I am desperately worried about her growth and her lack of eating. It’s really stressful and scary, and I hope that I’m doing the right thing.

We ordered a set of Dora sheets for her bed for her b-day, and plan to give them to her in a few weeks. That’s when we’re going to move her into her own room and hope for the best! I know it’s going to be very hard, but your strength has given me the determination and a bit more confidence that we can get through this.

I’m so glad that you’re getting sleep finally! HUGS.

[Author]

Posts