Sleepless

We had a good run of sleep there, what-was-it, last week? The week before? Anyway, there was even a night, the first-ever, in which he slept through from 10:00 until 6:00. That was glorious, un-heard-of, epic.

But now we're back to hell of every-two-hours wake-ups, which isn't quite in contravention of the Geneva Conventions, I don't think, but at nine months is quite unacceptable. I have the lingering threads of a cold, too, which I've been unable to beat wholly for nearly two weeks. Now it's a sore throat which I hope isn't strep. I'm convinced I'd beat it if I could just get some decent sleep. And even when it was fairly good -- not sleeping through good, but maybe two wake-ups per night good -- it still wasn't really all that great, frankly.

So it's back* to sleep training, heaven help us, which probably won't be so bad as I think, but won't be fun, either. This kid is fully capable of yelling on and off for an hour or more, and I know there are folks who think we must be cruel monsters to subject him (or ourselves) to that, but I can only assume that these folks have not gone without longer-than-two-hour stretches of sleep for weeks on end, or without eight full unbroken hours' sleep in almost ten months.

Walk a mile in my shoes, bitches. Or maybe you have, and you're just functionally insane, and think that this state of affairs is simply one of the challenges of parenthood. Which it isn't. Everybody needs to sleep. The crying and yelling sucks, and I wish it didn't have to happen, but the sad fact is that the only way out is through.

*I say "back" because we sleep-trained Ben around four months, wildly successfully: he went from being totally unable to put himself to sleep, having to be nursed and then nursed again when putting him down jostled him just slightly so that he woke up again, and then again, and then again, unable to nap except at the breast; to being able to be put down wide awake and fall asleep on his own pretty much every single time for naps and bedtime. And it happened in less than a week. God bless Dr. Ferber.