sleep update (in which miracles do happen)

One of the reasons I may have been lax at updating all and sundry on the sleep progress is that I feel disconnected from it. It has become Scott’s JOB. Four nights in a row I wasn’t even around for it. Two nights since I’ve been here but still barely involved. As a perfectionist control freak (who can’t get anything right and doesn’t trust anyone else to either) it has been strange to cede the role. And there’s been a little guilt, though I try to remember that for AGES I was the only one he’d let take him through songs, rock him, etc. And sometimes we split it. And whoever is keeping score will surely update me of our tally if needed.

As previously reported, night one was a bear with Jonah shouting 1.5 hours of protesting and law-degree-worthy wheedling/negotiation attempts from the crib while Scott sat in the glider listening to his iPod and occasionally interjecting “No, Jonah. Lay down. Head on the pillow.” The second night he only protested for 15 minutes before laying down. The third night and every one since he’s simply laid down when Scott put him in the crib and waited for sleep to come. Last night I got to read him books and take him to the potty. That was a new variant but it didn’t throw him off — he did try to get me to stick with him for songs but we weren’t going to take that risk. I could be susceptible to / the cause of renewed anti-sleep wheedling.

For now, Scott still stays in the room until the boy is totally asleep. Twice Scott has tried to leave too soon and the boy has popped up and Scott sits back down and waits again. That whole process takes — at most — half-an-hour.

Sanity is returning for both of us. Of course, we hope to progress to the stage where Jonah won’t need us in the room with him while he is falling asleep. There will be baby steps, so to speak. We haven’t received that assignment yet. We meet with her again tomorrow in person — which will also be her first time meeting Jonah IRL (she’d seen a couple of the YouTube videos). This is how she does her consults. First meeting with parents, phone/email daily, second meeting parents and kid.

We might have moved along the nighttime improvements trajectory sooner if naps hadn’t fallen apart, as they do, and worse.

On Friday, and Sunday, for whatever reason, none of our usual tricks (driving, stroller, trying the Scott in Chair technique) got him to sleep. Both days, at almost exactly 3pm he started asking for his bottle but I tried to deny it — believing I wasn’t supposed to let him use it to fall asleep at that time, since he’d already — both days! — had two bottles during the attempted drive-him-to-sleep portions of the days; and believing that as part of trying to cut bottles down, 3pm wasn’t the right time for him to have one (who said? I think my brain is trying to adjust to so many little new tweaks, I got confused and made up a rule where there wasn’t one).

Both days, he threw tantrums like we’ve never seen. He screamed, shreiked, kicked his legs over and over, flailed his arms. On Friday I caved more quickly, gave him the bottle, put him in the car, and he fell asleep — at which point I panicked because I thought it would ruin bedtime, napping so late, but amazingly, it didn’t.

On Sunday, Scott and I were together.

Sunday was amazing because we’d already gone to the Montclair Egg Shop for breakfast, walked around the village, bought fruit at the Farmer’s Market, played with a dog, listened to a woman with flowers in her hair sing folk songs and play 12-string guitar, played in the pinwheel garden (a rotating installation of donated pinwheels in a grassy square in the sidewalk), drove to Tilden Park to ride the Steam Trains for the first time, going around twice. That boy SHOULD HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP in the car on the way home, but he didn’t. We drove for almost an hour.

We came home, gave him a snack, and then tried the Scott-in-Chair/Jonah-in-Crib routine for OVER AN HOUR during which time I was listening through the wall, worrying, calling the consultant who was suggesting I pass a note to Scott under the door for him to come out for 5-minute breaks since the boy was happily playing and talking to himself and Scott, so maybe getting rid of the daddy distraction would’ve helped but then she said if he cries we should stop and right then he started crying so I got off the phone and barged in and Scott wanted to kill me because he was pretty sure he was just minutes away from getting the boy to sleep and at that point, around 2pm, we had to take him out of the crib and try something else.

One thing we learned is that calling the sleep consultant (her name is Meg) in front of Jonah, where he can hear us reporting in, probably not such a bright idea. At one point during his crib monologue he said, “I would call Meg and say ‘Hi'” — no joke. I told her about this and she said that we’d better learn sign language and/or confine our conversations on such topics to post-bedtime. Oh well.

At 3pm, we were in the car AGAIN trying to get him to nap. He wanted a bottle. We said no (see confusion above). We both worried that giving in to his tantrum would promote future tantrums so we white-knuckled, hoping the car would eventually knock him out. It didn’t. We pulled off the highway and into an alley so I could get out, hold the boy, calm him, administer bottle, return him to car seat, continue driving, at which point he conked out hard.

I’m pretty sure now that denying him milk in this precise (and apparently repeating) set of circumstances is completely stupid and we won’t do that again.

At the next session with the consultant tomorrow, yes, we will discuss this pattern and hopefully set up some strategies for dealing with it, and for getting naps to a manageable routine or at least series of if-then statements so we don’t panic again.

Cross fingers.