Sleep and Teddy = oil and water? part II

You can read part I here.

When you look at a sleeping baby there is pretty much no way not to go all gooey inside and get a big goofy grin on your face.

When you look at a baby screaming in your face who you have spent the last three hours bouncing on a ball and singing and talking to, it is pretty impossible to feel nice feelings at all.

I used to get so incredibly angry at this little person in our lives. I was doing everything in my human power to appease him and it still wasn’t enough. Didn’t he know how hard I was trying, what did he want from me? I get tears just thinking about it now because it was so so hard. I don’t think words can express how helpless I felt and how hard every day was to just barely eke through. We were surviving. That is it. Survival.

I read books, we met with our pediatrician multiple times, we even went to a sleep therapist. We were doing everything “right”. Trying to limit wake times, lots of fresh air in the sling, nice relaxing massages and baths, he slept in my arms, and still he would spend the better part of every night crying hysterically. Nursing no longer appeased him so I would sit in the dark in the living room and walk and bounce until eventually exhaustion would set in and he would sleep for at least an hour or two. I wasn’t asking for much, maybe just three hour stretches and a baby who would fall asleep in less than an hour and not cry all the time.

I had heard about cry it out and knew all the different opinions. Babies need attachment and their needs to be responded to, babies need closeness, babies can’t be spoiled- and I believed and still do, all of it.

At about 16 weeks Theodor reached a point where he started to kick me and scream every hour, this was a low point even for us and I decided that nothing could be worse then what we were doing.

So we took a big step and never looked back...

More coming in part III of Sleep and Teddy = oil and water?