Sleepin'

So I've been sleeping a little. Finally. We've tried gripe water and kinesiologists, extreme elimination diets and bacon. Osteopathy and homeopathy and cry-it-outopathy. We've tried big dinners and stinky t-shirts that smell like mama in the crib. For the past few days, Bunky has been going to sleep in his crib with just a few minutes of fussing (okay, let's call it what it is-- screamin'), staying in his crib until somewhere between 11pm and 1am, at which point Papa Bear (did I seriously just call Scott Papa Bear?!?) goes in and brings him to bed, whilst I slumber downstairs in the guest room until somewhere between 3 and 5a.m. when Max demands milk. We sort of stumbled onto this arrangement, which, while far from perfect or a long-term solution to our sleep woes, is working for the moment, and bringing me some much overdue sleep. We weren't really even planning on night weaning-- it just sort of happened.

I've been thinking a lot lately about "mothering in the middle." I got pretty wrapped up in the idea of "attachment parenting" and I still believe strongly in a lot of it-- wearing your baby, breastfeeding on demand, meeting their needs, etc. What's not so black and white is that my baby is now becoming a toddler and what used to be his needs-- frequent nursing, sleeping in bed with us all night, being carried like a kangaroo bebe, etc.-- are now more like wants. Whereas I need to be getting more than two hours of consecutive sleep. It's been an interesting learning process, with a lot of guilt, comparisons and chats with other mamas. What I'm finding is that most of us are always going to be somewhere in the middle of whatever continuum we're on, whether it's parenting or finances or even politics. There will always be someone more attachmenty than I, and someone more unattachmenty. (Yeah, I've been sleeping more but I think the vocabulary portion of my brain may still be recovering!) And there's some comfort in that.

Shoutout to my friend Megan who wrote a great article on the ebbs and flows of attachment parenting here.

I was really beating myself over even considering letting the babe cry at night. I frequent these message boards at mothering.com that are great in a lot of ways but also make me feel guilty. The tipping point for me, besides 13 months of very little consecutive sleep, was running into three moms within less than a week who all are very compassionate, attachmenty mamas, and all had to let their babies do some crying. That and my therapist who has been trying to talk me into this for months. So, we're part way there-- instead of laying in bed with Max for an hour while he sits up and down and up and down and crawls over us and yells "nigh-nigh-ni-ni-ni-ni-ni" and moans and pokes us in the eyes and finally goes to sleep, the little one goes in his crib, we leave, he cries for a few minutes and then he's out. It's pretty sweet.