In the past week, both boys called out in the night that they have to use the bathroom. I called back that the nightlight was on, and you can get up and go by yourself. Each one did. Let me revel in that for a moment.
For the first time ever, my boys can get out of bed in the dark, find their way to the bathroom, find the toilet, remember to drop trou, pee, and find their own way back to bed. Soon, I’ll even sleep through it! The boys are 5 1/2, and this may be the final milestone of sleepless nights! Of course things might sneak back once in awhile, a bad dream, a wet bed, a sickness. But the monumental shift has happened, and now we can actually expect to sleep through the night. It already happens more often than not. It’s like we’ve been crawling up this mountain for five years, lost in woods and fog, having to negotiate boulders blocking the way. Then, suddenly, you wake up one morning, and there is nothing between you and the sky, no lingering exhaustion from interrupted sleep, and you realize you’ve reached the top. Done.
I remember how hard it was way back at the beginning, when bed was a co-sleeper, or a little bouncy chair that kept L from projectile vomiting, or even their cozy little car seats. Half the time, it was a pair of arms or a sling. It was months before we used their cribs. Back then, there was no real difference between bed and not-bed, like there was no real difference between night and day. I remember Velcro-ing a huge, flat pillow around my waist in pre-dawn light, and trying to nurse both babies. I was on a hamster wheel of nursing-pumping-supplementing-sleeping with little time for anything else. Someone told me to keep a journal, and I learned it’s the only way to remember anything. There was a rough night around 4 months old, when Lori was out of town. We must have implemented a routine to establish the difference between naps and bedtime because I wrote “bedtime.” Ha. I remember nothing of a bedtime. D had gone to sleep with a bottle in his mouth. He’d just eaten another 2 ounces… after eating 4 ounces of formula and refusing the breast. My world went off-kilter when my baby wouldn’t nurse. Minutes after I’d laid D down, while I was unhappily pumping the milk he refused, he woke screaming. Not fussing, but wailing. His cry was so piercing, it hurt my ears. What life-threatening ailment could have happened in the last 4 minutes?? I ran to pick him up. A small burp came up. Breath. Calm. This cycle repeated 2.. 3.. then 4 times. D did not want to go to bed. He must have had gas from the formula. I was still trying to pump. He yelled so loudly, it woke L, who started to wail. I bent over to turn off the pump, and spilled precious milk on the carpet. “FUCK,” I muttered, and L started to cry with that frantic note that tore my soul. I held two wailing babies while both ears rang. The damage was done. Bedtime was ruined. I was frazzled. Maple (the geriatric dog with 3 legs) was downstairs crying even though I’d helped her upstairs twice already. She had to wait. I sang to cover the sound of her crying while I gave D more milk, rubbed L’s face, gave him a pacifier. Sang to them. Waited. Finally snuck out of the room, soo tired, so spent. It’s so much harder alone.
Finally, at 8 months old, D’s hair was long enough to have bedhead. Both kids woke up happy- often, I think. I couldn’t tell you how often, really, but I know mornings were always better than nights. My memory works in Polaroids. We had transitioned them to cribs in their own room when their night-time noises were keeping us awake unnecessarily. I remember peeking over the crib gate, and having L’s eyes light up with a smile bright as 10,000 suns. D would see me looking at him, and his whole face would dissolve into a gaping grin, full of joy. He’d grab my face, and pull it in for a slobbery kiss.
We had a rule when they were babies that I didn’t go in to nurse them until 6 A.M.. We made this rule after a long, painful effort creating a bedtime that included as much cry-it-out as we could bear, and many other less-effective, but less-painful strategies. As with any new rule, the kids tested it out, like this. D woke sometime after 4:00, and cried. He went back to sleep, I think, but was up again at 5. Lori went in, and tried to soothe him. He wasn’t having it. She came back to bed, and he yelled for 45 minutes. He wasn’t yelling with loneliness or hunger, it was more like, “I’M AWAKE!” Finally, I gave in at 5:45. When I came in the room, he was yelling at the monitor, not towards the door. Was he that smart?? He gave me big smiles. L was still asleep. I picked up D, and tried to crash on the futon in his room. He crawled off, then pulled himself up on me and babbled as I tried to doze. Babbling was more like yelling at me to wake up. He worked the room, exploring the bathroom, the closet, the dresser, the chair, the table, looking for toys, pulling himself up. L finally stirred, and D raced to his brother’s crib. L’s face appeared over the bedrail, and the boys grinned at each other, making a ghee sound that meant, “Good morning!”
Then, there was the night D’s first tooth poked through. We’d had a normal, fun, peaceful day. Good naps. Good eating. They played in the hot (warm) tub. D seemed a bit subdued or tired. I thought he might be teething, but wasn’t sure. Then… bedtime was hell. D cried, screamed, hollered, and yelled for two hours. We weren’t even doing any sort of cry-it-out, just a normal bedtime. We tried: rocking, holding, ignoring, standing, sitting, laying, more food, nursing, bottle, pacifier, homeopathies for teething, Tylenol, quiet play… Finally, desperate, I swaddled him, and held him to my chest with the pacifier in. I pushed the pacifier against me so he couldn’t spit it out. He fought and cried for a couple of minutes before he finally passed out. I found the tiny bit of tooth poking through his gum the next day.
We made rules: babies sleep in cribs, no more night-nursing, setting a solid bedtime. We all slowly settled into a routine around bedtime and sleep, but there were always wake-ups. We never just let them cry- babies communicate by crying, and we always listen to our kids. (-except during that one desperate period when we resorted to some miserable sessions of cry-it-out.) We split nights in half. I’d go to bed with or shortly after the kids, and Lori would stay up for a few hours. For those hours, and then until 2 or so, she would take care of wake-ups, giving me a solid chunk of sleep. I’d take the early-morning hours, and if there weren’t any wake-ups between 12 and 3, we’d both get a nice, extended stretch of sleep. Funny how that looks so good on paper. I don’t recall ever actually feeling rested. On the occasional night when I’d get a solid 5 hours, especially after several sleepless nights, I’d wake up high on sleep, like I’d had 3 shots of espresso. Here’s a typical bedtime turned magical. D had refused to nurse or take a bottle while L was playing, but once L was in my arms, that was the only place D wanted to be, too. He waited, holding my legs, idly playing, taking the bottle from Lori for a minute, then coming back to me. I put L to bed, and picked up D. L seemed to be sleeping, but rolled over after a minute. He stood up in his crib, crying. D was nursing, so I told L to go to sleep and ignored him. Another rule: never to interrupt a nursing baby. Both kids had to learn to be patient. After a bit, L sat down, played with the pacifier, banged on the wall. At one point, it was quiet. I looked over, thinking he’d gone to sleep. I could barely make out his head in the dark, but he was still sitting up, looking back at me, waiting. Finally D finished, and I laid him down, asleep. L was finally lying down, but stirred as I walked by. He cried, and I tried without success to settle him. I picked him up, and he stared into my eyes with the clearest, happiest, soul-penetrating smile. I stood for a minute with our foreheads touching. I don’t know what “it” is, but he gets it. That was all he wanted. He then went to sleep.
At 18 months old, they both slept for the first time until 7. D learned to crawl into L’s crib, which terrified a sleeping L, and caused him many anxious nights. Then, they both learned to crawl out of their cribs, and my morning wake-up became the sound of pattering feet. There are hormones that happen when you birth and nurse a baby (or two) that help with sleep. Along with a lovely mushiness, they make you able to fall asleep and wake up fully in an instant. When the hormones left, I suddenly needed normal sleep again. A kid crying out, even in his sleep, could then leave me awake for an hour. I wonder when the nighttime cry became, “Mama!” or “Maddy!” That obviously happened at some point. So the story goes, the kids sleep in longer stretches, but the parents need more sleep, and we never quite catch up. At some point, I began saying every night at bedtime, “May your belly be full of happiness, and may your dreams be sweet.” It felt a little strange without comprehension on the other end, but it became habit. Every night, I tell them this.
Isn’t it strange how difficult it is to settle into a circadian rhythm? I can’t really account for nights from age 2-4 other than to say we set a bedtime, and sometimes it worked. I remember during the 2-naps-a-day stage that it was imperative to get both babies sleeping at the same time. If their naps went by leapfrog, I croaked. As soon as I got the 2-naps-thing down, one was ready for 1-nap-a-day. Every time we settled into a routine, it changed. It’s not like they both just dropped a nap one day, and seamlessly switched to an earlier bedtime. We’d have one late dinner, and bedtime would be wrecked for days. For years, driving anywhere after 3 PM gave me anxiety because a kid falling asleep in the car meant a party at bedtime. If we did end up driving somewhere, I’d do anything to keep the kids awake- I have watched a kid fall asleep while I’m driving, despite my best efforts swerving the car around and pumping the brakes, singing the Mickey Mouse Hot Dog song as loud as I can, and tickling his feet. As parents, we were so desperate for alone time, we started staying up late after the kids went to bed. We thought that just because we got a few good nights of sleep, there would be plenty more, and we jumped with glee back into pre-kid habits. This is the same line of thinking that makes you do shots at a party.
Just when we could see the sky at the top of the mountain, potty training happened. That’s when our mountain climb became a game of Chutes and Ladders, and we landed on the long slide that takes you back to square 2. There’s no clear marker to say when we’ve made it past bedwetting. One day you just realize you haven’t changed the sheets in 3 weeks because you stopped changing them at all during daylight hours. At 4, kids fall out of bed. They lose their pillows and blankets. They have bad dreams, or sometimes just need to know we’re there. I don’t know if it’s a cumulative effect, or maybe it’s because you expect to get more sleep than you do, but at this stage, if one wets the bed and the other requires a panicked 2 AM run to the bathroom at just the wrong time in Mama’s sleep cycle, Mama is wrecked for three days. A kid with a cough (ours are particularly traumatized by a stuffy nose) can leave us totally bedraggled.
At some point, our bedtime routine became pajamas- brush teeth- read books- go to bed. I cuddle with each boy for a couple of minutes, which is probably unnecessary, but very hard to quit. I still always tell them, “May your belly be full of happiness, and may your dreams be sweet,” Now they understand what I’m saying, and D especially, carefully says it back. I also ask, every night, “How much do I love you?” And they know to say, “Infinity!,” which has generated a multitude of comebacks along the lines of: “I love you a billion-gazillion MORE than infinity!”
At some point too, the boys started crawling into bed with us every morning when they woke up. One morning, when the boys were 3 and Lori was out of town, I awoke to L’s cold, cold hands on my cheek, “Feel my hands, Mama!” Instead of crawling into bed with me, he’d gotten up, pushed a chair to the front door to reach the lock, and gone out the front door. We live on a relatively busy, suburban street in San Francisco. We now have an out-of-reach chain-lock at the top of the front door. The boys crawled into bed with us (almost) every morning until after they turned 5, when, instead of Mama or Maddy, the first thought in their heads upon waking became Legos. I still wake up to the patter of little feet, though they don’t end at my bedside anymore. Once in while, my baby will climb into bed and cuddle for a bit. After a long, quiet night of uninterrupted sleep, this is heaven.
It’s been quite a climb, but the view is lovely.
Mamagrit 