With our first two children, the boys, we had few problems with sleeping through the night. #1 from birth was an incredible sleeper and even needed to be woken as a newborn to eat. He's kept on that path, regulates himself well, especially now that he's entirely done with naps, and always gets a full night's rest. #2, generally our more troublesome child, would predictably wake up ~once per night up until a little after his first birthday. Then for most of his second year he'd even sleep until like 8am every day, it was so nice. Though he can be a challenge to get down at night, still, and wakes somewhat early, once he's down he's down for the night. This provides peace of mind and we know we're spoiled.
Enter child #3, our daughter. You can't really expect an infant, under one year certainly, to sleep all night all the time. Until recently she'd wake up once or twice, take some milk and go back to sleep. When my wife was still breastfeeding she handled this the vast majority of the time, it was quick and easy, before coming back to bed. I dreaded this aspect of her being away for work, which only happens a few times a year, but our girl was usually kind and slept well. For the most part since the end of breastfeeding the frequency of her waking up stayed the same, with the key piece she was pretty easy to get back down. It's not the optimal situation for someone to get up with her every night but at least it wasn't for a long time. We were still getting sleep and patiently waiting (hoping) that a switch would happen, like it did with #2, where we'd suddenly see improvement in how well she did overnight.
We've gotten the opposite. It started with her getting sick right before Christmas. Little ones that are too congested to breathe are so pathetic and need some help. She'd wake up a couple times per night and basically had to be held upright, so she could breathe well enough to fall back sleep. For a solid week while she was sick one of us held her most of the night, sleeping in the rocking chair in the nursery or on the living room couch (me, mostly, to let my wife sleep too). We didn't love this circumstance but these are the things you do for your children. But we saw her getting better and figured this would be a temporary exercise.
It now appears that she's been trained to see mommy and daddy in the middle of the night. Or maybe she's trying to train us. Either way, though she's long past being sick, she's continued waking in the middle of the night, sometime between like 1 and 3am. She won't, can't self-soothe and always crescendos herself into a real mood. For a week or so after her sickness we'd go do the same thing, pick her up, let her fall asleep on us, typically fall asleep ourselves and spend most of the night in her room or wherever else. If she was brought into our room she'd climb all over and no one would sleep. If we laid her down she'd cry and cry and cry. One night I was kinda over it and tried to sleep through the crying and, two or three hours later, she was still going strong. She's incredibly stubborn. We couldn't go on like this and needed to try something else. It was the first time we needed to think about sleep training.
We've tried making our visits with her shorter and more hands-off. Instead of picking her up, we'll try only rubbing her back. This hasn't gone well. When I pick her up now I don't sit down, rock her standing for only a few minutes, then set her back down. The first few nights this didn't work all that well but it's gotten better. She was still waking up but our time in there was shortening back to something more reasonable.
I also tried something entirely different. It's winter in Minnesota and, though it hasn't gotten that cold outside yet (it's finally coming), it gets pretty cold in the house overnight. The nursery was especially chilly, something we picked up on during our many nights in there. I wondered if the cold was part of the reason she didn't sleep well. So I sealed up that window with a 3M plastic insulator kit and brought up our space heater. It's one that doesn't run the entire time it's on, only when the temperature drops to a certain point, and isn't hot to the touch either. We're two nights into trying a warmer room and thus far this seems to be a major victory. She's slept much better and longer and we're not going to mess with a good thing.
Anyway the last three/four weeks have been utterly exhausting, physically and emotionally. We're so very tired. I've needed a lot more coffee than usual. Let's hope the long stretches keep coming.
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