BKB

35 lbs this kid weighs! Which is spot-on his growth curve and all and not a means for concern, but good grief, he's a bit of a lot to lift and tote. And that was a big part of what spurred us to move him from a crib to a toddler bed this week.

If we hadn't happened to buy a crib that converted to a toddler bed, I would have no truck with toddler beds, and would have put him right into a single bed, or possibly just put his crib mattress on the floor. But lo, the wonder of Ikea.

Sadly, and maybe for the first time, Ikea let us down. When we took the bars panels out and went to take the top panels off the headboards, it became immediately clear that there would be no detaching and reattaching the decorative cap pieces. They didn't have a flush, flat-to-flat join; they had some kind of grooved thing that was on no account A) going to come apart without solvents or B) going to attach to the bottom panels of the headboard without sawing and sanding. Naturally, we began this process about forty minutes before the kid's bedtime, so power tools were not in the cards. We left the bed with no decorative caps, which means it has a sad, unfinished edge with weird holes. Meh.

I had intended to get a pair of those bed baffle things to keep him from falling out, but I forgot, so instead we put a big dog bed right beside. The bed's only about six inches off the ground, anyway. I wondered if he might not end up preferring the dog bed, and if so, whether it was my duty to discourage that.

I had searched for toddler bed linens online, and found two mutually exclusive categories: the ugly and the ruinous. One advantage of moving your kid out of the crib while he's still this little is that he has not yet developed an attachment to any licensed characters, so there was no tempation to yield to the ugly in the form of Elmo or Thomas or Spiderman in their poly-blend luridness. Nor was I quite willing to shell out fifty bucks for Dwell Studios' precious hipster 100% cottons. Besides, I didn't think the kid was going to be able to manage the top sheet + comforter; it seemed like a recipe for tangled child. But that was the only formula available from Target, which I quickly realized was my best bet for spending under rather way, way over fifty bucks.

So, Ikea. Which sells toddler pillows and duvets, and then sets of duvet covers and pillowcases (because for pete's sake, if you already have the crib, you already have fitted sheets!). But which doesn't ship its kid bed linens. I did actually consider the idea of tossing the kid in the car and driving three hours to New Haven. I'd have arranged to meet my mother, so it wouldn't have been thoroughly crazy, but still. She offered to go instead, and that was a much saner plan.

So. It only remained to see whether Ben would accept this transition or raise holy hell. Would he pop right out of bed and bang on the door, screaming? Would he rampage through his bureau or pull all the books out of his bookcase? We took the space heater out because he has a desperate fondness for buttons, so at least he probably wouldn't burn the house down. He's a pretty mild-mannered toddler, so odds were in our favor, but then he's always been an iron-jawed sleep resister, so there's that.

There was some initial yelling, but he didn't pop out or fall out of bed. And he settled down pretty quickly. We've now put him down for three bedtimes and two naps, and there's still a little outrage, but it's short-lived and appears to be on the way out. There have been some wake-ups, but no more than in the crib. And we're not out of the woods, I'm sure -- he could decide to rampage at any moment, after all -- but I think it's not premature to call the experiment a success.

But I would never jinx us like that.

Co-Sleep / No-Sleep

We didn't co-sleep. Ben slept in a co-sleeper until he was around four months, then we moved him to his crib in his room. (For those of you who haven't geared up an infant in the last ten years, "co-sleeping" is putting the baby in bed with you, and a "co-sleeper" is a bassinet with three sides that attaches to the side of your bed so the baby is in reach but not actually in bed with you.)

I'm not philosophically opposed to co-sleeping, but it wasn't an option for me for a couple of reasons. One, I love pillows and blankets, and the recommendation for safety when co-sleeping with a newborn is not to have either. It seemed to me that the comfort offered by co-sleeping would be significantly reduced by stripping our bed. I didn't relish kicking out the dogs, either. Also, I like very much to read or watch TV in bed. At some point, I assumed, this child would be going to sleep before 9:00, and what was I going to do, headphones and booklights? This is my time to unwind, and the furtiveness would have bugged me. Possibly the biggest con for me, though, was the stories I'd heard of people trying to get toddlers or big kids into their own beds and having a hard time with it. Discipline and making big, uncomfortable, "for-your-own-good" transitions are so very much not my bag. It seemed easier, even during the hell of a sleep-resistant infancy, to buck up and Ferberize rather than buckle and co-sleep.

I had friends at the time who were co-sleeping, and whose babies (and therefore whole families) slept great. I envied them their rest. Now, though, while Ben reliably sleeps through and requires at most a brief redirect (usually a cuddle in the rocking chair), most of those kids are having a tough time with the transition to their own rooms, which in a few cases corresponded unfortunately with the arrival of a new sibling. I also know former co-sleepers whose transitions were seamless, though it seems less common, just like I know families who transitioned to a crib and sleeping through without incident. (I should say I'm more or less conflating co-sleeping with other forms of not sleep training. If you, say, lie down with your toddler in his room for an hour so that he can fall asleep, I'm lumping you in with the co-sleepers.)

So it seems to me that it's a trade-off. At some point, presuming you eventually want the child in her own room, she will need to learn to put herself to sleep there, and put herself back to sleep when she wakes up there. No matter when it happens, whether in infancy or later, it is a tough lesson to learn, and it's tough on the whole household. I think you should do what works for your family, but it seems to me that there's a positive benefit to getting this unhappy stage over with sooner rather than later, especially if another baby is going to enter the scene.

Blame the Sleep Deprivation

Parenting a toddler has its challenges, and I'm not minimizing them, but it is so much easier now than it was around this time last year. Around this time last year, I decided to take Ben on a road trip to visit friends in Philadelphia, DC, Charlottesville, DC again, and New Jersey. It was going to take nearly two weeks. In my mind, if I didn't embark on this insane journey with him, I would never go anywhere or see anyone again. At the time, he was sleeping three or four hours at a stretch and was a fairly typically mercurial four-month-old. We got as far as Philadelphia, and he woke up and needed to be nursed back down often enough overnight that I knew I'd never make it on that kind of crappy sleep, and it was much better to turn back while still mostly functional than press on and get farther from home before having to make the same decision.

And that was fine. I missed seeing the other people, but what mattered was that I'd made the attempt. But what's significant when I look back on it is that I'm sure I really didn't grasp that Ben would grow out of that sleep insanity, that in a year he'd be relatively easy to travel with, that even if I didn't take him on road trips as an infant, he'd eventually be ok with travel just by virtue of being a little kid instead of a baby. Not that travel with a little kid doesn't have its own issues.

What I'm getting at (not very cogently) is that it's kind of astounding how blind I was as the parent of a newborn to the notion that infancy would, you know, end. That no matter how crazy it was, it couldn't possibly go on forever. Part of it, I'm sure, was the lack of sleep. But part of it, too, was just the degree to which having a baby spins your head around. Everything is different and crazy and has new rules -- it's no wonder that it's so hard to see clearly what the new progression will be.

I remember saying on several occasions that I couldn't believe, having gone through this once, that anyone ever has a second child. Andy used to vow (only maybe 98% seriously) that Ben would be an only child. And you can blame the sleep deprivation for our inability to form memories back then, because now the horror is a lot fuzzier, but now the idea isn't so terrible.

I wonder how many second children are conceived soon after the first child starts sleeping through the night.

(I'm not trying to be coy or anything. We do plan to have another baby. I'm being a little goofy about not wanting to be vastly pregnant in the summer, though, so we're waiting a bit.)

One Nap to Rule Them All

We've made the transition from two naps to one. It went on for a week or two: he'd go a couple of days with a totally normal (two-) nap schedule, and then we'd have a rough day where he'd fight the morning nap, or take the morning nap and then fight the afternoon nap and be Mighty Crabcake all day. And then right back to two naps the following day.

A few people advised me to keep pushing the morning nap back by half an hour every day until the afternoon nap turned into bedtime, and I'm sure that's sensible advice, but somehow it just didn't work out that way. On the days when he took a morning nap, he clearly needed it -- he'd be short-tempered and eye-rubby by 9:00, and even if I'd kept him up until 10:00 the previous day, I wasn't about to make either of us suffer for an hour on principle.

And then one day I realized that he would hit a kind of crabby period around 9:00 or 9:30, but if we pushed past it, he got a second wind and played on happily for another couple or few hours. And that was that: one nap at around 11:30 or noon. So far, he's still only sleeping for about an hour and a half, which was a fairly typical length of time for one of his two naps. I'm guessing he'll learn to stretch it eventually. Or not.

He's still sleeping 11 or 12 hours at night pretty reliably, and in fact we moved his bedtime up a bit since the transition to one nap, from 7:00 to 6:45, and he generally sleeps until around 6:30 in the morning. On the weekends, when nobody's up and moving earlier, he often sleeps until 7:00 or even 7:30 (bliss!).

I miss the big chunks of time to myself in the morning and afternoon. I'd got used to eating breakfast when he went down in the morning. I don't like to eat as early as he does (7:00 -- giving him breakfast is the first thing I do when I wake up and Andy goes to work), and he kind of flips out if I eat in front of him and don't share. I've started giving him a snack before he naps, around 10:30, and I generally hold out and eat with him then. And luckily he's really great about entertaining himself and not getting into trouble, so that even if I don't have as much solo time, I have plenty of opportunities to, say, read a book or write a blog post without his needing me every five minutes.

I was at a shower this weekend, talking to other mothers of babies and toddlers, and few of Ben's age-mates in the group had bedtimes as early as his. I have to say, that kind of strikes fear into my heart. From the first weeks of sleep-training, the hours between Ben's bedtime and ours have been a gift. To watch TV, knit, do fiddly little projects with sharp tools on the coffee table. To relate to one another as adults. To give the poor dog a break. I know eventually Ben's bedtime will get later. And it'll be fine, we'll deal, it'll be the new normal, and I won't miss those hours as much as I think I will.

But please, not yet! Not soon!

Sleeping Through

It's been a while since I posted anything about sleep. (I still feel the hovering shadow of the jinx, but I'm going to post anyway.) Since April, in fact, and I realize now that I've gone looking for posts about sleep that I never provided any closure on the issue for my gentle readers, nor have I said anything about what went right after so much had gone wrong.

So I'd like to tell you all about how we got from several wake-ups a night in April to none lately, but the sad fact is, I really don't remember! I know (because I read my own blog) that we tried to night-wean in the spring, and I think it was partially successful, but there was some backsliding around colds and teething. When we were at Andy's parents' in early June, I was still nursing Ben back to sleep when he woke up at night. But somewhere between that trip and the next, we night-weaned in earnest, because I know I resettled Ben without nursing him while we were at C.'s house.

I started out talking about sleeping and somehow I'm talking about nursing, and I think I've hit on what happened to make this kid sleep through. I think weaning was what finally really did it. The less he was nursing, the better he slept. So long as we both knew I could pull out the big guns, comfort-wise, whenever he couldn't get himself back to sleep, he was more likely to hold out for the boob and not resettle on his own. I was incentivizing his wake-ups.

He still wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes, but it's unusual, and he always goes right back down either by himself or after a quick check and cuddle. It's pretty amazing to me, actually, how he's gone from being such a lousy sleeper to such a good one. And it only took an entire, miserably sleepless year!

The next hurdle is naptime. He's been great about taking consistent morning and afternoon naps for months and months now, but just this weekend it seems like he's resisting the morning nap and moving towards nap consolidation. In the short term, I think, this is going to mean that he gets one too-short nap in the late morning/early afternoon until his body gets used to the schedule and stretches the sleep a bit more. So, early bedtime for a while until we hammer out the details, probably.

I'm excited about moving to one nap. I like the idea of having two longer stretches of time with him to do stuff like errands and outings, and one longer stretch of time to myself to do stuff like write blog posts and make soap.

All Together Now

Until last night, Ben ate in his highchair in the kitchen, and I basically gave him one thing at a time as I made it, and Andy and I ate dinner after we put Ben to bed. But lately we'd been wondering whether a slightly later bedtime might result in a slightly later wake-up time (5:30 AM = so not fun for all), though the idea of losing even half an hour of our precious grown-up time in the evening was painful to contemplate. (We'd been putting Ben down between 6:30 and 7, and going to bed ourselves around 9:30 or 10.) But then it occurred to me that Ben is ready -- way past ready, in fact -- to join us at the table for dinner, and that we could solve all our problems by having dinner earlier, all together. (So that while we put Ben down later, we don't then have to spend any time making dinner for ourselves, so we have about the same amount of leisure time.)

So we did it last night for the first time, and the dinner part, at least, was a success. It was a bit of a scramble getting everything ready together, even though I was only making frozen pizzas and a Greek salad. But Ben hasn't warmed up to salad, and needed more than French-bread pizza to eat, so I made a standard Ben dinner while Andy finished the salad and wrangled the boy-o and fed the dogs, and we managed to sit down to a relatively civilized dinner, all three of us. It was very nice.

Sleeping, oy, no such luck. I don't know whether it was even related to the change in schedule, but the kid had a really tough night with several wake-ups, none that he went down easily after. He did sleep about half an hour later, though, but what with all the wackiness overnight, I don't consider it good data. So we'll see.

And Still More about Sleep

So here's where we are with the sleep thing.

It was going swimmingly there for a while. The kid would go down and stay down with a few little bleats of protest punctuating the silence but not turning into full-on screaming hysteria. I was pushing his overnight feed later and later every night, and mostly he was sleeping well past those appointed hours.

And then the teeth. Two more on top, one a little ahead of the other. Tooth A (which is really Tooth E, but whatevs) didn't seem to cause him that much distress. In the past,t he worst pain appeared to happen before the tooth showed itself, and Tooth A erupted without my noticing any difference in his demeanor. But Tooth B, oh my heck. Tooth B was apparently a real byatch, because out of nowhere, his sleep went to hell again. Up every few hours, couldn't be redirected back to sleep, lots of yelling which eventually resulted in my buckling and nursing him, poor little guy.

The day after the third night of this was really bad. I was exhausted. He was a crabtastic crabtacular jumbo lump of crab meat. I was short-tempered. He was short-tempered. The morning began with him biting my nipple and me yelling at him and bursting into tears. The worst part (though I have to say, having your nipple bitten by sharp little fresh baby teeth is pretty bad, and it's hard to name a worse part of any day) was feeling defeated -- not only did it seem like we'd lost the sleep battle it had appeared we'd won, but there was now one less tool in the box, night-weaning having come to naught.

Of course, I hadn't really focused on the teething yet, so all of this seemed like random, unexplainable failure to sleep. Once I realized what was going on and started dosing him with ibuprofen at bedtime, things went a lot more smoothly. I was open to giving him a break and nursing him down when he was having a hard time -- this being a phase requiring mercy rather than a pattern requiring squelching.

But Tooth B is nearly out now, and his daytime mood suggests that he's not suffering anymore, so no more ibuprofen, and no more comfort nursing. I had a plugged duct this morning, so I may do a dream feed before I turn in just in case, but we're going cold turkey till dawn.

Night Weaning Status Report

I should have mentioned in my last post that it wasn't just sleep training we were about to attempt; it was also night weaning. Sleep deprivation makes you forget stuff.

So. As his "normal" night nursing schedule was somewhere along the lines of every three to six hours, we'd take the outside of that range and make him go six hours between feeds, or once a night, with the intention of pushing that one feed later each night until it was eliminated.

First night, Thursday. Down at 6:45, slept straight through his usual wake-up-and-nurse between 9:30 and 11:00 and woke at 12:30 (close enough to the six-hour cut-off), diaper change and nursed down, slept until 4:00, woke and fussed and grumbled (with a check-and-snuggle) for half an hour or so, slept until 6:30. Excellent.

Second night, Friday. Down at 6:45. Up at 10:30, resisted all attempts to check and soothe, cried and yelled for an hour and a half, reducing me to a sobbing mess of jangled nerves. I checked on him three times, the last time with a diaper change (all that standing and yelling produced) and a long cuddle in the rocking chair which calmed us both down somewhat, and then we both slept. Until around 3:00, nursed down. Up again around 4:30 and another round of yelling on and off until around 5:30, when he fell asleep again until 8:00. Not what I'd call a good night.

Third night, Saturday. Down at 6:45. Sporadic grumbling cries followed by silence. Up at 5:30, diaper change and nursed down. Up at 6:30, check, back asleep until 7:30. Beyond excellent.

I might get over this sore throat (which Andy now has, too) after all.

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.

Credit

I had friends with toddlers over the other day, and the visit happened to coincide with Ben's usual lunchtime, so I hauled his be-boostered chair from the kitchen into the living room and proceeded with his parade of solids: dreary-ohs (generic organic oat circles), small strips of whole wheat bread, spoon-fed full-fat cottage cheese, quick-microwaved green peas, and spoon-fed stewed-fruit mush (usually apple, pear, and blueberry). For Ben, this is kind of a light lunch. Generally I'd throw another veg in there, like greenie beanies or little cubes of sweet potato or broccoli florets. And maybe a cracker. And some yoghurt.

Anyway, the moms were impressed with the quantity and variety of his lunch foods, and his ability to get so much of it into his mouth himself. And because eating, like sleeping, is one of those parenting minefields, I was feeling pretty proud of myself for managing it so well and creating out of whole cloth this wonderful, enthusiastic eater.

Yeah, except if I took credit for how he eats, I'd have to take credit for how he sleeps. No, thanks.

Jinx

Andy, for all his resistance to woo-woo crap and embrace of left-brain rationalism, is a big believer in the jinx. Me, not so much. Any kind of luck that needs to be maintained by keeping mum is not the kind of luck I'm ever going to have as a bosom buddy.

But about the kid's sleep, I can't help it. If he sleeps through one of his two usual overnight feedings, I hesitate even to mention it to Andy, lest I wake the Jinx Powers from their own light slumber. I write blog entries when he's sleeping poorly, mention my distress on forums, but when things are going well, OH GOD SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

When he still slept in the bassinet in our room (and I use the term "slept" very loosely), just the tiny click of my putting my glasses down on my bedside table would sometimes wake him. I was convinced it was a kind of jinx. I wasn't really attempting to sleep unless I took my glasses off. If my glasses were on, why, I was in a state of catlike readiness, and wouldn't be at all bothered if the baby started wailing again and required another forty minutes of nursing. It probably wasn't even the sound -- it was probably a coincidence, two nights in a row when he happened to wake within ten seconds of my setting the glasses down.

And yet here I am, nearly four months after moving the boy into his own room, as much time in his own room as in ours now, and I can't help but put my glasses down gingerly, wincing if they happen to click.

Phase vs Pattern

Ben's been having another bout of bad sleeping. He goes down fine -- like a ton of bricks, actually -- at his normal bedtime, and generally sleeps soundly or resettles himself easily until around 10:00, bedtime for the rest of the household. Then I nurse him again and either he falls asleep while nursing or I put him down drowsy, and, again, he has no trouble getting to sleep. But he's up again an hour or two hours later and repeats the hour- or two-hour-interval wake-ups for the rest of the night most nights.

The last time he went through a bout of this, about a month ago, we tried to Ferber through it, leaving him to cry for increasing intervals to remind him how to settle himself. In theory, anyway. In practice, he just wound himself up into hysteria, and even if he wore himself out and fell asleep for a while, he'd be up again in no time, hysterical again. This time, we decided to treat it as a phase and not a pattern, and comfort him through it with nursing instead of teach him through it with Ferbering. It feels like the right thing to do. My suspicion is that what's behind the sleep troubles is his working overtime on sitting up and crawling.

This phase vs pattern debate is a great way to make yourself feel like a shitty parent. If it's a phase and you make the kid suffer to learn something irrelevant, you're a big jerk. If it's a pattern and you coddle the kid into an unhealthy habit, you're a big jerk. And you can't possibly know until the damage is done. Enjoy!

Drag

I was in Philadelphia this weekend visiting friends on the other side of the gulf. For Sunday, the only full day I was to be in town, I had made plans to meet friends for two events: coffee at La Colombe followed by walking around in Center City, and early dinner at Pho '75.

For both events, the friends meeting us were about 45 minutes late. Under normal circumstances -- normal, in this case, being me pre-Ben, the me they're all used to (I moved away whole pregnant) -- no big deal. I might have noticed and been concerned about their safety or about confusion over location, but that's about it. With the baby in tow, though, those 45 minutes meant something else, something bigger, something I wouldn't ever expect them to be able to anticipate and so can't in any way blame them for not avoiding. Which is to say, I want to talk about it because it's an excellent example of the gulf, but I don't want any of the people involved (who constitute a significant proportion of my reading public) either to think I'm pissed off at them or to be pissed off at me.

So let me break it down. I want to be a calm person, capable of interaction and fun, and I want my kid to be happy and pleasant to be around. The best way -- in fact, the only way -- for that to happen is for the interaction to take place as soon as possible after A) a nap and B) a meal. From the moment the kid wakes up and comes off the nipple, the clock is ticking on his mood. The first hour is gravy: almost guaranteed great mood. Smiles, self-entertainment, total propaganda baby. He is at his most pleasant and, if even pleasant babies aren't your cup of tea, his most ignorable during this stage.

After an hour, things get iffy. Sometimes I can turn the crab around by nursing him, but nursing itself can make plenty of childless people uncomfortable, and my aim here is to make things more comfortable for all of us. After two hours, even if I've managed to nurse him, keeping the crab at bay requires active intervention: walking, bouncing, holding and retrieving toys, etc., and even those things may not work. And even if they do, I can't help but be aware that though he may be distracted from his discomfort, my kid is now uncomfortable.

If we're in public, especially in a place like a restaurant, where my kid pitching a fit has an impact on other people trying to enjoy themselves, I am constantly aware of the impending need to decamp suddenly, interrupting the meals of everybody in my party, if the crab becomes without warning a full-on hysterical scream-fest, the likelihood of which increases with every minute.

If it happens to be bedtime, then this kind of distraction and prolonging of wakefulness is also just about guaranteeing that he's not going to fall asleep easily, or sleep well -- which means I may not have the two or three hours of evening freedom his early bedtime allows me, nor the luxurious four-hour stretches of sleep between feedings that come with undisturbed sleep for him.

So the bottom line is those 45 minutes bit a significant chunk out of my ability both to enjoy those visits and to be myself enjoyable.

All of this is hardly news to anyone who has ever parented a five-month-old. And none of it would have occurred to me before I had one myself. And more than that, even after hearing the (tedious) explanation, I'm not at all sure that my reaction wouldn't have been a little impatient and judgey: uptight parent, can't just go with the flow a little, what a drag. Which is exactly what I don't want my friends to think I've become, which is exactly why I picked times and places carefully and shaped naptimes and nursings as best I could to avoid a situation in which I would have to become uptight parent who can't go with the flow. What a drag.

Advice #1: It's Just a Phase.

I am 35, and yet, astoundingly, I have only one close friend in my age cohort with children. Carrie got married right out of college, and had kids when I was still closing bars and bouncing checks. Her children are smart and happy and pleasant to be around, and so it's not just because I love her that I seek her advice on parenting.

She gave me lots of great advice during the hellish and wonderful (but hellish) first three month's of Ben's life, most of which I immediately forgot because of the sleep deprivation. At some point I floated the bazillionth theory about why the boy was having another episode of horribly short sleep stretches, and she said, basically, "It may be that. But one of the things I've learned as a parent is that a lot of the time, it's just a phase, and it's not something you can explain or solve." She went on to encourage me to keep attempting to explain and solve, because at least it's good practice, but not to feel that every problem has a solution, nor that failure on my part to find it is, well, a failure on my part.

What a relief.

We Ferberized Ben about a month ago, and for the most part, it's been an astounding success. But last week, we hit a new snag. He would wake up sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 AM and be absolutely unable to go back to sleep for an hour and a half. One by one, we eliminated all the theories and solutions: it was not because he had a cold, because he'd had his four-month vaccinations, because I'd started doing a dream feed at 10:00, because the room was too cold or too hot, or because he was hungry. We changed the timing of naps, the timing of bedtime, the timing of the dream feed. We turned on (or did not turn on) the plinky-plink-music aquarium toy to keep him company while we attempted to steal back fifteen minutes of sleep. No matter what we did or didn't do, the kid woke up sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 and couldn't get back to sleep for an hour and a half.

Last night we ran out of stuff to try. We made up our minds: we were just going to have to power through it, however long it took, doing the best we could.

The kid woke up once at 1:00 AM to nurse and then slept through to morning (albeit a very early morning) -- our very first night of only one wake-up.