Intrepid Murmurings

Oh sleep, remember all my sleep woes back in the day?  Oh man, it was rough.  What a difference a year makes......

....you'd think, right....?  

Ha ha, not so much, sadly!  Though after reading those old posts, its definitely not as bad as it once was!  At some point I just stopped posting about it all, because it was too dang depressing and repetitive.  But after LOTS of work, trying a million things (and waiting it out) we did get a good thing going for quite awhile -- not "sleeping through the night" but managable wakeups, easier and easier bedtime routines, eventually the ability to go down in that holy grail of "sleepy but awake" and put themselves to sleep.  They were slowly slowly SLOWLY getting longer stretches, and this spring we were down to one or two wakeups a night, per baby (many of those simultaneous, which is good, and sometimes one before I went to bed, also ideal).  

And then, for two magical weeks in June, after they turned one, we had sleeping through the night!  All by themselves, with me doing nothing to cause it!  

And then, enter molars, stage left.  Times eight.  Boo!   

And now, sleep has reeeeeeallly gotten bad again.  What the heck?  They are 16 months old! I think its been the three months of nonstop teething (those molars take FOR EV ER!), and the patterns of waking and nursing and cosleeping that came from that. Elsie in particular wakes up SO DANG MUCH, like every few hours, or even every 45 min or so for part of the night recently.  And stands there hollering in her crib (as soon as I come in she starts jumping in excitment, trampoline style) when she used to cry/fuss and then go back to sleep.  She does nurse back to sleep really well, and usually transfers well (though sometimes just won't unless I bring her into our room and/or bed).  But.  The night wakings.  Ack!  Delia also has them, just not as often, and sometimes hers are more bad dreams (she just is SO SAD and I don't mind comforting her at all in these cases).

Knock on wood, naps have been going fine.  Super super regular, easy to get them down, and while they aren't super long sometimes, they are decent, and hour to an hour and half, twice a day like clockwork.  I'll take it.   

So I've known that I needed to do something about the nighttime sleep, and have been contemplating CIO (cry it out) or nightweaning, or both, in some combination.  But procrastination has gotten the better of me, and I was managing pretty well (I really have gotten quite used to not sleeping much and feel pretty decent) until this week.  But its really time.  Emma was 16 months when we nightweaned, so that is in my head as well.  If she could do it, these little girls should be easy!  

Any kind of sleep stuff is doubly hard with two, though.  For one, if I let them cry, they wake each other up, or one passes out while the other cries, and then they switch.  Misery!  If I put one in the P & P in our room they sometimes just cry and cry because we are right there but out of reach.  And with their room right next to Emma's, I worry about it bothering her, too.  There's also the worry that if I nightwean, they will still wake up  (as Emma did until she was two years old!) but then I won't have this great super easy way to get them back to sleep.  But the biggest issue for me is that nursing them to sleep (or to sleepy, at bedtime anyway) is the ONLY way I know how to calm two crazy, riled up or fussy babies by myself.  It works like a charm.  Trying to read stories, rock them or sing to them just doesn't work with two -- they squirm and kick and grab each other (and scream) and try to stand up and climb, yada yada yada.  Its insane.  Nursing just works so well!  So I don't want to cut it out completely, thats for sure. 

Anyway, after another spectacularly bad night on Sun, I decided to start last night with the nightweaning.  It couldn't really get any worse, so why not bite the bullet and get going?  I was just going to start by cutting them off after less time, like nursing for 5 min and then returning them to bed, because I didn't want to go cold turkey after they had been nursing so much in the night -- supply and demand, you know?  I already had one plugged duct this week and don't want any more!  

So I put them to bed as usual, but talked up the sleeping thing -- that they had water int heir cribs and didn't need milk every time, that they could go back to sleep by themselves if they woke up....and low and behold, THEY SLEPT!  Elsie woke once at 11, Delia slept the whole night!  Both went down as usual at 7:30 and were up at 6 (which is actually great -- often they are up for the day by 5-5:30).  

Yahoo!!!  I keep telling myself not to expect a repeat, especially since this awesome night followed such a horrible one (and the horrible one has been much more the norm for the past few weeks).  But, it was nice to see that it IS possible, and it makes me feel like the sleep training/changes should work pretty well, if it comes to that...