(no subject)
We've had kind of a tough month. Isabel got sick in the second week of June, and had a chest cold for about two weeks. I, on the other hand, got sick two days after she did and was sick for almost four weeks. It's been tough going. I should have anticipated that Isabel would change her sleep patterns, since a "sleep regression" is almost a given after a baby has been sick. By the holiday weekend, she was waking up four times a night. Erik and I would jump into bed quick at 11.30 because the two-hour stretch until Isabel woke up at 1.30 was the longest and the best. That's not good. So this weekend we started sleep training.
I think sleep training is the toughest thing a parent has to do before the need for discipline starts. I flailed around for days, trying different things and giving in often enough that I was clearly bound for failure. It turns out that strategies that involve Isabel crying aren't going to work because I just can't stick to the plan. Finally I found an article on an attachment parenting site [here, for anyone else with this issue] with an approach that seemed gentle enough for us, so we gave it a try. And it worked! It just involves gradually stepping down how much attention I give her when she wakes up in the night and cries, but I don't have to withdraw and leave her on her own at any time. By Saturday night Isabel slept uninterrupted from 11.00 to 7.00 the next morning. Whew! I felt like a whole new person on Sunday!
As the ongoing sleep deprivation drains me of liveliness, our apartment is blossoming with life. First it was carpenter ants, strung like leggy amber beads across the walls of our apartment from their nest to the kitchen. I tried all sorts of things to stop them (including shredding them in the vacuum cleaner), but eventually we had to resort to professional pesticide. After the second poisoning, they dwindled away but were replaced tenfold by sugar ants, hundreds of tiny little black specks forming insanely orderly moving queues that turned our kitchen counters into a series of invisible highways and country roads. We defeated them with traps, and now it's just us and the mosquitoes. Lots and lots of mosquitos.
I think sleep training is the toughest thing a parent has to do before the need for discipline starts. I flailed around for days, trying different things and giving in often enough that I was clearly bound for failure. It turns out that strategies that involve Isabel crying aren't going to work because I just can't stick to the plan. Finally I found an article on an attachment parenting site [here, for anyone else with this issue] with an approach that seemed gentle enough for us, so we gave it a try. And it worked! It just involves gradually stepping down how much attention I give her when she wakes up in the night and cries, but I don't have to withdraw and leave her on her own at any time. By Saturday night Isabel slept uninterrupted from 11.00 to 7.00 the next morning. Whew! I felt like a whole new person on Sunday!
As the ongoing sleep deprivation drains me of liveliness, our apartment is blossoming with life. First it was carpenter ants, strung like leggy amber beads across the walls of our apartment from their nest to the kitchen. I tried all sorts of things to stop them (including shredding them in the vacuum cleaner), but eventually we had to resort to professional pesticide. After the second poisoning, they dwindled away but were replaced tenfold by sugar ants, hundreds of tiny little black specks forming insanely orderly moving queues that turned our kitchen counters into a series of invisible highways and country roads. We defeated them with traps, and now it's just us and the mosquitoes. Lots and lots of mosquitos.