Bedtime, or a lack thereof

We suck at putting our kids to bed. Mostly, I think it's a matter of having no self-discipline, and mostly, I think it's my fault. Jacob we completely screwed up, and I won't say how because I don't want people coming back at me with well, he should be in his own bed by now or you should have just let him cry it out when he was a baby. But it's still tough getting him to bed at night, some nights, that is.

I always thought that the next kid would be different, that I would know what I was doing from the beginning in the sleep department. I was wrong. I still don't get it.

Someone asked me today if Sabine sleeps well at night (I don't know why people are always asking this question). I told him, "Well she did, then she was born into our family." In the beginning she did sleep well. The first night of her life she slept completely through the night but I was too wound up by giving birth to sleep myself so I just sat there in amazement, watching her sleep. I can't really remember what it was like right when she came home from the hospital, but she basically slept pretty easily, not as much as they say a newborn should though. Then I remember for a while we were really good. I'd lay her in the co-sleeper and she'd stay there for the first shift of the night, which was 3-4 hours. Then I guess she grew up a little bit and tuned into the world more. It wasn't so easy in that she'd just fall asleep, she had to be put to sleep.

That's where it got hard. The rocking chair was still in our room then, so I think I was rocking her to sleep, or wait, maybe this was the phase where she had a cranky time in the evening and we had to bounce on the yoga ball with her in our arms for half an hour. I remember we would always note that she got cranky and tired about 7pm or a little later. It was then that I decided her 'bedtime' would be 7pm, and Jacob would follow with an 8pm bedtime. Previously his 'bedtime' had been 9pm but the time change was fast-approaching and I knew we'd have the whole 'fall back' thing to our advantage. It actually worked for a time and I'd say that was our most successful bedtime attempt to date.

Then I guess after that was the rocking chair? See, it is already a blur in my mind.

A note: When I use the word bedtime, I am simply referring to an arbitrary time Zach and I use when we want to threaten Jacob with something, or when he thinks there wasn't enough playing in the day, as in, "Jacob, it's 9:30! That means it's already past your bedtime!" We're probably really screwing with his head by using this word in any sort of context.

I remember one time, just one time, when we were all upstairs getting ready for bed, and I remember this clearly because it had never happened to me before - Zach was in the bathroom brushing his teeth, Jacob was in the bed, awake, and Sabine was in the co-sleeper, awake. I must have been folding laundry or something at the foot of the bed and hadn't started thinking about putting Sabine to sleep because she was just in the co-sleeper for safe-keeping. She was cooing to herself, or playing with Snuggle Bunny, and then all of a sudden she wasn't cooing. I peeked over and her eyes were closed, her body relaxed. All signs pointed to sleeping but I couldn't believe it! I called Zach in to look and we were all just astounded. I had that one brief moment of total clarity where I thought, so that's how it's done! And It Never Happened Again.

So I guess that brings us to the rocking chair and Pachelbel's Canon in D. I decided we would relax them to sleep if it killed us. Both kids were now 'going up to the bedroom' (I say it this way because what goes up must come down, as in downstairs after a failed bedtime) at the same time because we'd been having the problem of finally getting one to sleep, only to have the one still awake make noise and wake the sibling. I'll call this the 'two birds with one stone' method. All the lights got turned off, everywhere in the house. The Sleepinator got turned on full volume. Pachelbel ran on a continuous loop. Lavendar oil was smeared all over the room and all the humans present. Sabine was swaddled and set to rocking in the chair with me. Jacob was snuggled in bed with Zach. My one rule was going to be that I would not nurse Sabine to sleep because I want her to eventually go to sleep on her own, and I thought maybe this was the way to go about it. The whole thing took so much effort, sometimes yielding no results, sometimes only yielding tears and yelling from various members of the family.

We'd go about this for a week or two tops before it just took way too much energy. It shouldn't be that hard, right? We'd get lazy and start to loath the hour of 'soothing to no avail'. Then after a week of being lazy we'd buck up and try to establish some routine again. All the while the children were learning that their parents are suckers and will always revert to taking the easy way out at bedtime.

For the last month or two it's been a mish-mash of Sabine falling asleep nursing/us both falling asleep on the couch/me rocking her downstairs/swaying with her upstairs, etc, etc, etc. However she was falling asleep, it would always end with me trying to put her into the co-sleeper, taking five minutes to make the transition, only moving one finger at a time, pressing my head to hers, letting my hands hover above her abdomen, only to have her wake right the hell up. How frustrating! At this point the rule "Whoever goes up, will not come down again" was established; meaning we were going to teach the kids that the bedroom meant Sleep, with a capital S. Once you go up to the bedroom there is no manipulating. Dammit.

Yeah, right.

A big part of the problem is that we are parents of small children, and by definition that means we are exhausted people. Once Zach and I go upstairs to get them to bed, we start to get tired ourselves (if we weren't already). And when you are tired and in a dark room, soothing round-faced cherubs to sleep, chances are, you are going to fall asleep too. My only time to get anything done is late at night, but if you're in bed with a little one, A) You will fall asleep and nothing will get done, B) You will stay awake but lose all motivation for doing anything productive, or C) You will look over at the sleeping child in your arms/on top of you/snuggled around your body and not be able to peel yourself away. Knowing that any of these possibilities is likely to happen makes me have a strong aversion to going anywhere near the bed if I'm in the middle of something. But it's not like I'm doing something selfish, like tooling around on the internet, I'm actually doing useful things that have a direct impact on keeping this household running. So it's sort of like a Catch 22.

For a while now the co-sleeper had been relegated to the other room, which could be a bedroom if some other more disciplined family lived here. I pulled it back out tonight, a concrete symbol of our new effort.

And this is what happened: Sabine fell asleep nursing, in the living room. She miraculously stayed asleep through being poked by Jacob who thought it would be funny to wake her. She stayed asleep (on my lap) through one round of Chutes and Ladders with the three of us. Then Ginger came into the room and shook her body. This woke Sabine. I was somehow able to get her back to sleep but refused to go upstairs with her when Zach repeatedly told me to. I really wanted to play the damn game with the two of them. We never get to do stuff like that. I knew if I took Sabine upstairs that she would wake right up and I couldn't go back down to resume the game.

I finally relented and went upstairs, layed her in the co-sleeper, almost had both my arms out from under her and Jacob came up the stairs to get into jammies. He happened to be singing a little ditty on his way up and, pop! her eyes shot open. She played with Snuggle Bunny for a few minutes and finally it was too cute that Zach called me (now downstairs) up to see. By then we were all back to using full-volume voices and Sabine was laughing. I went back down. Zach held Sabine (but oh yeah, she only wants to be with me at night) until she started freaking out looking for me. I went up, tried to hold her, but she was fighting to nurse back to sleep. I gave her back to Zach, he swaddled her and I started to read to Jacob. He finally gave her back and she cried some more so that I couldn't even hear myself reading. We put out the little lamp and Jacob rolled over to go to sleep. Sabine screamed her head off some more while I was actively trying to sooth her. Eventually Jacob could no longer take it so he went back downstairs. Another 15 minutes getting Sabine to sleep - all snuggled up on my chest. Then I went downstairs only to find Jacob wide awake on the couch, it was well after 10pm.

What's funny about all this trying is that we've really gotten nowhere with the kids but in the process, I've become a morning person. I've been falling asleep on the couch with Sabine at 9pm, the laptop just a couple feet away from us. This is probably the furthest away from sleep hygiene that one can be, and I'm sure those electrical currents from the computer are fabulous for a baby to be exposed to, especially while she's trying to sleep. On the bright side, I pop up all ready for the day at 7am. I get more done before 9am than I used to get done before 5pm. But we still can't get anywhere on time. A discussion for another day...