Category: Sleep

Now that I am a mother of two children, one infant and one preschooler, I feel suddenly qualified to dispense a bit of wisdom to those moms just starting out. If you’ve just had a baby, or are getting ready to have one, or are even thinking about having one, I have a few helpful pointers for you. Here is my personal, time-tested, step-by-step procedure for getting a good night’s sleep. Starting at…

8:00 PM – You’ve had a long day, chasing after one child and hauling around the other. If you’re in luck, Daddy is home. Hand him the oldest child for a bath, a sippy cup of milk, and a few stories before bed. Emphasize that the oldest child needs to be tucked in no later than 9 PM. Otherwise, she’ll be cranky as a bear the next day. Not that he cares, because he gets to blithely head off to work while you stay home to deal with the little monster.

8:10 PM – Take the baby upstairs. Put her in her basinet and listen to her fuss, cry, and then howl while you try to prepare for the next day. You know that if you don’t pull out your clothes, down to your underwear, for tomorrow morning, there’s no way in hell you’re going to get dressed before 5 PM tomorrow. You also know that this is your only chance to get a shower as well, so if you can stand it, let the baby scream until your ears bleed. The shower should muffle most of the noise.

8:25 PM – hop out of the shower with shampoo still in your hair. You can’t stand the screaming anymore and your husband can’t find “The Pigeon Eats A Hot Dog,” which is currently your eldest daughter’s favorite book. Locate the book, comb out the last of the shampoo and throw on some PJs. Realize you forgot to dry yourself off and toss the now soaking PJs in the hamper. Dry off and put on fresh PJs. Pick up your shrieking infant offspring and collapse in the glider for half an hour of breastfeeding. Try not to swear as your baby chomps down on your nipple in revenge for letting her cry for a few minutes.

8:30 PM – kiss your eldest child goodnight when she comes in to see you.

8:32 PM – kiss your eldest child goodnight again when she comes in searching for the sippy cup she’s lost.

8:37 PM – kiss your eldest child goodnight for the third time and tell your husband you’ve already got your hands full with the infant; could he please put the eldest child to bed before you get irritated?

8:53 PM – your baby has sucked the right breast dry and is too full to even consider the left breast, which is about to burst. At least she’s nodding off, so put her in her bouncy chair (because the only other place she’ll sleep is in bed next to you) and pray she stays asleep for the next two hours.

8:54 PM – take eldest child firmly by the hand and escort her out of your bedroom, explaining to her that the baby was asleep and she didn’t want to be woken up. Pick up the baby and let her chew on your already leaking left breast for ten minutes.

9:04 PM – put the now sleeping baby back in her bouncy chair. Head off eldest child at the door before she comes running into your room again. Take eldest child back to bed. Get down on your hands and knees and check for monsters under her bed. Assure her you’ve sent them all packing and they will not return tonight. Dig out extra night lights and turn the hall light on. Kiss eldest child goodnight again and head back to your own room, where your husband has already managed to fall asleep.

9:06 PM – lie awake for the next hour and a half, listening to your husband snore. Wonder where the hell he learned to make noise like that.

10:33 PM – the baby wakes up crying and hungry. Get up, change her diaper. Pick her up. Hear her make a horrible farting noise as she poops in her clean diaper. Put her back on the table and change her diaper again. Repeat twice more. Collapse in the glider with baby and nurse her until you fall asleep.

11:45 PM – wake up with a horrible crick in your neck because you fell asleep in the glider again. Put the baby back in her bouncy chair. Climb into bed and doze off.

11:52 PM – wake up as eldest child runs into your room screaming about monsters under her bed. Wonder why she always comes to you with these late night problems and not her father who, by the way, is still snoring loud enough to make the house shake. Take eldest daughter back to bed, check for monsters again and reassure her there are no such things as monsters, although secretly you think small children might qualify as such.

Midnight – lie awake in bed for another hour, listening to your darling husband snore some more. Wonder where you would hide his body if you really, really had to.

01:30 AM – the baby wakes up crying again. Nudge your husband and tell him to change the baby. Stumble around in the dark trying to find the bathroom because you really have to pee. Do your business and return to the bed, only to discover darling husband went back to sleep. Swear at husband, who is snoring too loudly to hear it, and change the baby yourself. Plop back in the glider again and plan to stay awake this time while you nurse. Promptly fall asleep.

02:28 AM – wake up in the glider with an even worse pain in your neck. Eldest child is tugging on your sleeve, crying about monsters again. Realize the cats are probably jumping into her bed and waking her up. Fantasize about crucifying all three cats in your front yard, not far from where you plan to bury your husband. Put baby, who is no longer sleeping peacefully, back into the bouncy chair. Take eldest child back to her bedroom. Chase out the cats with a few choice swear words that you hope afterwards eldest child will not remember and repeat. Explain to eldest child there are NO MONSTERS and she really, really needs to stay in her own bed for the rest of the night. Trudge off to bed only to remember the baby is now awake again and wants to nurse some more. Back in the glider you go.

03:47 AM – the baby refuses to fall asleep. Instead, she stares at you with one beady blue eye, daring you to put her down in the bouncy chair again. You do. She howls. You stick your fingers in your ears. No good. She’s still howling, loud enough to be heard over your husband’s snoring. Husband actually wakes up. Tell him it’s his turn to rock the baby and curl up and go to sleep. Give husband a kick if he doesn’t get out the bed.

04:12 AM – husband wakes you up and tells you the baby wants to nurse again. You get out of bed and take the baby. He climbs back into bed and starts snoring again. You realize death is too good for him.

04:28 AM – your neck is so sore and stiff you can no longer sleep in the glider. The baby seems to have permanently attached herself to your right nipple, while the left is leaking breast milk like crazy. In fact, you’re pretty much soaking in the stuff but are too tired to care. Climb out of the glider and crawl into bed with the baby still attached. Pray for some meager measure of quiet as you try to curl up around your sleeping lump of a child. Discover your husband lost his pillow in the middle of the night and stole yours because, hey, you weren’t using it.

04:58 AM – just as you are about to doze off, the bedroom door opens yet again. Eldest child runs in crying incoherently about cats and monsters. Get up with baby still attached to your right breast. Take eldest child back to her room and order her into bed. Tell her she can not get up again until morning. Go back to your own bed. Discover husband has now commandeered your half of the covers as well as your pillow. Swear at husband until you are blue in the face. He still can’t hear you over the snoring. Get back into bed and kick husband until he relinquishes his hold on the blanket.

05:16 AM – Eldest child sneaks into your room and creeps quietly to your side of the bed. In a loud voice, she announces “Mommy! It’s morning!” Open your eyes and discover that yes, the sun is actually rising. In China. Tell eldest child to go back to bed now. Feel incredibly guilty as she runs crying back to bed. Get up, put now sleeping baby back in her bouncy chair, and go to your eldest child. Give her a big hug and a kiss and apologize for snapping at her. Ask her nicely to stay in bed until you’re ready to get her up. Kiss her one more time and head back to bed. Baby is asleep, husband has quit snoring, eldest child has promised to stay in bed. Finally you can get some sleep.

05:30 AM – the alarm goes off because you, you idiot, had actually planned to get up early and get a jump on the day. Everybody except your darling husband wakes up. The baby is crying. Eldest child runs into the room asking if it’s time to get up yet. You sit on the edge of the bed and weep in despair. Hope you remembered to program the coffee maker, at least.

And that’s it, Helen’s step-by-step plan for getting a good night’s sleep when you have children. What’s that? You don’t see any sleeping actually written into the plan? Well what did you expect? You’re a mom. You can sleep when you’re dead.

In case you didn’t know, babies sleep a lot, just not when you want them too. The same holds true for three-year-olds.

Sam has been what I consider a very sleepy baby. I’m still not quite sure of the color of her eyes, as she almost never opens them. Most of the day, Sam is either curled up in my arms nursing or lying limp as a wet noodle in her car seat, stroller, or on the floor. The only thing that wakes this child up is her bath, which sets her to screaming. The rest of the day, she’s snoozing.

At least until midnight comes along.

It’s common for infants to have their days and nights confused. I think this problem starts in the womb. During the day, when Mommy is up and active, the baby is being constantly rocked by the motion of her mother’s body. When Mommy lies down to sleep the rocking stops and the baby wakes up. Pregnant moms will feel the baby wake up and start kicking, usually as they’re getting ready to nod off to sleep. Obstetricians know about this, which is why they instruct pregnant women to lie down when they do kick counts in their last trimester. They know the baby is going to wake up and complain because they’re not being rocked to sleep.

So babies come out of the womb conditioned to think that day is night and night is day, and it takes time to retrain them. We are currently retraining Sam.
She does okay from about 9 PM until midnight. She’ll nurse for twenty minutes and then snooze in her little bouncy chair like a champ. The problems start when she wakes up for that midnight feeding. Once she’s had a chance to cuddle in my arms and rock, she doesn’t want to be put down again. She’ll nurse and nuzzle until she’s asleep, but the moment I put her back in the bouncy chair and crawl into my own bed, she wakes right up and starts fussing. If I don’t immediately crawl back out of bed to pick her up, she starts wailing. If I try to let her cry it out, she starts screaming and I have no choice but to pick her up again.

This all started a couple of nights ago. Prior to that, she was too sleepy to tell night from day. It might have been a growth spurt the first night. Every time I picked her up, she wanted to latch on and nurse, so I spent all night lying in bed hunched over with Sam attached to me at the nipple. Not a comfortable way to sleep. The next night, to save my back, I took her to the glider each time she woke up. She’d nurse for two or three minutes and then doze off. I’d put her back in her bouncy chair to sleep (she hates sleeping on her back in the basinet) and Sam would wake up crying again. We went back and forth for over two hours, with both of us getting more and more upset as the night wore on. By 2 AM, I was swearing at my husband, who patiently lay in bed and tried offering suggestions. He got up and tried rocking Sam himself, but she wouldn’t even doze off in his arms. It had to be Mommy. We kept going back and forth with her until 4 AM when Cassie came running into our room crying. Apparently monsters were trying to get her while she was asleep. I handed Sam to Michael and took Cassie back to her room. We checked under the bed and found nothing. I got her tucked in, gave her a kiss, and told her she’d be all right. I went back to my bedroom, took Sam from Michael and tried nursing her to sleep again. Twenty minutes later Cassie came running back in, complaining of more monsters who sounded suspiciously like our cats. This time Michael took her back to bed. She stayed there another twenty minutes before coming back to us screaming about the monsters again. This time I got up, swearing under my breath at the cats, and took Cassie back to bed. I turned the bathroom light on in addition to all three of Cassie’s nightlights and tucked her in one last time. It was now almost 5 AM. I went back to my room, let Sam nurse one last time and then tucked her in too. Sam fussed for two minutes, let out a tremendous fart and finally fell asleep.

The next night, the pattern continued, except this time Cassie waited until after Sam had farted and dozed off to come running into our room. To keep the peace, I let Cass climb into bed with me, where she slept fairly peacefully for an hour or so. Then she rolled over and elbowed me in the breast, which immediately caused a flood of milk to leak out and soak us both. We did the same thing again the next night. All of this nocturnal activity slowly started driving me crazy.

So yesterday, I came up with a plan, at least for Sam. As best as I could, I kept that kid awake all day, which means she cried a lot. I did every thing I could to piss her off and make her fuss. I gave her a bath. She screamed. I made her lie on her tummy for a while. She howled. I put her down naked on the floor to air out. She wailed in indignation. I let her sleep in short snatches throughout the day, but I wanted to make sure Sam was tired when night came.

For the most part, my plan worked. Sam went to sleep after each feeding except the 3 AM one. That one took a little work. The key seems to be that tremendous fart she makes each night. Apparently the little porker gets gassy and that’s what’s been making her so fussy. I bicycled her legs, massaged her tummy and patted her back before putting her down. She fussed for a few minutes and then I heard this small, wet explosion. Turned out to be a combination fart and projectile spit up. I’m surprised the kid didn’t blow herself inside out.

Cassie still came into our room this morning and curled up in bed next to me. She slept peacefully for a while, which was good, but was a real bear when I got out of bed to nurse Sam. Michael had to take care of her, since Cassie wouldn’t go back to her room and play. But all in all, we did finally get a night of some sleep. I’m still shuffling around like a zombie this morning after having to wake up every two hours to nurse, but I can manage as long as I get some decaf coffee into me.

All in all, I can’t help but quote George Hamilton when I look back on the last few nights. Great man, great actor, that George. He said all there was to say about children and sleep in the movie Love At First Bite.

“Children of the night… SHUT UP!”