There are certain things that your parents only tell you once you've locked yourself into having a child. For instance, I found out that my sleep habits as a baby drove my parents to use drugs. That is, they used drugs on me after ten months of sleeplessness. They may have gone to a vet at the time, but at least these days, you have to be an epileptic dog or cat to get a prescription for phenobarbitol. I still sleep less than a "normal" person is supposed to, although I've never been able to shake my urge to take a catnap at around 2PM. (Coffee and a good croissant seem to be a workable substitute for the catnap.)
Learning to walk and learning to talk are straightforward, or at least apparently so, as a combination of demonstration and natural inclination make it almost inevitable, but you wouldn't think that a baby would have to learn how to sleep. At least so far, Emme's nailing her other milestones well ahead of the statistically official schedule, but good sleep habits are proving elusive. Taking her to bed with us was a sanity measure when she was tiny, restless, and hungry, and maybe it was karma after we'd presumptuously assured ourselves that we would never co-sleep. Stern looks from our pediatrician aside, I felt good about the choice, and now that Ferber has partially recanted, I can feel good about having an authority say that it's OK. (I wonder if the people in the NYT picture really look like that when they wake up...)
Eventually, however, three's a crowd, especially if the third person wakes up in a bad mood every couple of hours. (Other than a hit of boob juice (duh), Old McDonald and my down-tempo version of the Lumberjack Song appear to be her two favorite appeasements...) We read the books by the usual suspects, and we even tried one round of Maximum Weissbluth (short version: put baby in crib, come back in morning) when Emme was about 6 months old, back before she could crawl. Emme would have none of it — in addition to complaining profusely and at length, she used the nighttime hours to rip the bumper off her crib and learn how to get from her back to sitting up, so we bagged it after five days with no improvement. (At nine months, she's walking if given something to push along, and if we put her in her crib, she's on her feet in a flash and likes to hold onto the rails and jump up and down or see how long she can stand without falling over...)
With Holiday travel behind us, it's time to give sleep training another shot, albeit by other means. The goal is to communicate to the child what's expected and to have them understand that it will be firmly enforced but that it's not really that unpleasant. With that as the guiding principle, we're armed with a new nighttime routine, an indefinite timeline, and will see how it goes.
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