26 February 2014

I wish I had a photo of my baby's sweet smiley face for this post.  (When you ask him, who's the baby?  he smiles and points to himself.)  This weekend we faced the bedtime demon and defeated him.  Bobo outgrew his crib several weeks ago and we moved him into the bottom bunk and put away the pack'n'play.  He was okay with it, but he kept getting out of bed and we tried a whole bunch of strategies to convince him to go to bed, but none of them worked.  (Part of the problem was that we made this move while we were all sick, Bobo included.  With horrible sinus congestion.) We were getting less and less sleep, and finally after he stayed up until 2 a.m. last week, we decided we were done with creative strategies and that Bobo was just going to have to figure it out.

Friday night we put him in bed and then I held the bedroom door shut for an hour and a half while he complained about not being allowed out of his bedroom.  Nut Brown went to sleep in our bed.  Finally he got himself back into bed and went to sleep.  We'd tried this before but he'd just screamed for two and a half hours, so we let him out and moved on to other ideas.  This time I decided that I was ready to hold the door shut for hours and hours until he went to bed, because him not sleeping was making life so hard for the other four of us!  I felt very fortunate that it was only an hour and a half - not sure what's different this time around, maybe that he's a whole three weeks older?

Saturday night he made a half-hearted effort and went to bed after half an hour.  Sunday night he only fussed for five minutes.  At this point he'd figured out that he wasn't going to be allowed to open the door, so instead of twisting the knob, he started knocking on the door and calling 'mama!' (heartbreaking).  Last night he still fussed, but we are definitely making progress.  He still gets up in the middle of the night and comes to sleep in our bed, but I'm hopeful that once he finally gets rid of the last of the cold/sinus bleh he'll sleep all the way through the night.

Thank goodness for small mercies, like a baby who learns to go to bed so I can go to bed too.