Counting Chickens

I was so proud of my self-soothing, putting-himself-to-sleep baby. I would watch little George Hopper on the video monitor, eyes open and then drowsy, falling peacefully to sleep night after night, and wake feeling relatively decent having only had to get up twice a night to feed him.

That ended about two weeks ago. Fortunately, the night sleep is still pretty solid, since I only have to get up once at this point. For this I am grateful. But the bedtime process, and now the napping, has steadily deteriorated. What was once a nice sweet, 20-minute bedtime routine has devolved into a 1.5-2 hour slog. Napping is no longer predictable, both in terms of length of the nap and in terms of whether he will take naps at all. I put him down, he sleeps for five minutes, then wakes up. Over and over and over. After a while, I give up on the nap. But there is no giving up on bedtime, which means that I am spending far too much time in a dark nursery every evening, missing my older boy's bedtime.

Now, this is nothing in comparison to the feelings of despair that I felt with my first boy. I have experience in my hip pocket and I know that this will not last and there is probably nothing I can do better than I am doing it, that he is changing as I knew he would.

Despite all this, I can't help trying to find out WHY OH WHY did he change? Does he hate the swaddle? Is he too hot? Is he overtired? Should I let him cry for a few minutes to see if he can settle himself? Why would a baby take so damn long to fall asleep and then proceed to sleep soundly for a 7-hour stretch? Shouldn't the whole night be effed up if the start of it is so crazy?

What for the love of god is going on here? And what the hell am I doing prowling through sleep blogs and Babycenter sleep threads when I promised myself that I would not do that this time around? That shit needs to stop. right. now.

And so then I sit down to write about it and, as always, the writing soothes. There comes a point (several points, or several hundred points) in every mother's life-with-baby that she realizes that she is just doing everything she can for the baby but it still feels like it's not enough, or not good enough. And, in most cases, she needs to set those feelings aside, snuggle her baby, acknowledge that the 1.5-hour bedtime might just be her reality right now despite how crappy it is, and do something nice for herself. I'm going to take a nice long shower.