Mindless Juices

Seriously, besides being practically so perfect, I’m almost worried, he also doesn’t want to sleep.

First, on the perfect part… He’s healthy, he seems to be on track developmentally, and he doesn’t hate us.  That’s pretty much perfect to me.  It just so happens that he seems to get along well with other people, which makes me wonder if he’s just happy with adults, or is he actually happy to see me specifically.  In a few more months, it should be easier to tell.  Over the next few months, he should start to develop his ability to ask for “aw-ma” and “ah-pa.”  Hopefully, he will accept no substitutes for me and my wife and asking for us.  Then, the fun part of trying to convince him to accept substitutes sometimes… <I sit, grinning, as I write this.>

The truth is, I want so badly for him to know that *we* will never leave him, that I have this irrational thought in the back of my head that wishes he would not accept substitutes.  But, I know it’s important he knows that his parents are *not* the entire world.  I’m confident that he’ll trust us and love us and, then, I can only hope that he’s willing to let us in and help him through anything he’s going through for the rest of his life… yeah, right, he’s a boy… “Well, no pressure, just don’t screw up and don’t give him any reason to hate you.”  Oh, the impossible dreams that are parenthood… we just do our best and pray that our child realizes that we’re no more perfect than he is, but we’re trying and we love him.

OK… I know, this is what I signed up for.  If you want to be a parent, so comes the sleepless nights.  However, we weren’t ready for the thrown into the deep end part of it all.  You see, we realized that our son would need to adjust his sleep schedule.  We were making excellent progress.  In fact, we even had a couple of pretty positive nights.

Then, a few days ago, he decided that he doesn’t need to sleep.  I’m not sure how or why he came to this conclusion, but he did.  Now, we don’t know his exact history of sleeping.  Perhaps the whole thing isn’t special to him at all.  But, he’s not interested in us putting him to sleep.  He’s not interested in going to sleep on his own.  He’s not intersted in sleep.

Basically, regardless of how much his body tells him to go to sleep and we fully support his body’s wishes, he fights everything about it.  He’ll even be just about fall asleep and fight it.  I mean head down, limp limbs, eyes closed and, then, as if he suddenly realized what was about to happen, he’ll wake up and rub his eyes in an effort to wake himself up.  Even after the drive down technique, a few minutes in his crib, he’d realize, “Hey, I’m asleep!  They tricked me… bastards.”  Cry.

This goes for naps and for bedtime.  He’s just not interested in sleep.

Now, we’re not interested in the “cry it out” method.  We tried it for all of five minutes and it’s not good for our family.  So, we needed some other ideas.  We looked online and we were encouraged by some other ideas and some experts suggesting that sometimes it’s not about the routine, it’s about figuring out the needs that particular night or that moment and trying to do that.  Sometimes, it’s a series of things that might not be a part of the routine.  Maybe, the routine needs to change.

Of course, we haven’t even really gotten our routine down yet…

However, during the course of trying to “Wear him down,” we found an interesting question in a FAQ about an 8 month old who suddenly started having sleep issues.  In the answer, the expert said through his years of working with infants, he believes that 8 month olds who sleep through the night may just be the minority.  Apparently, there’s something about being this age that makes babies completely uninterested in sleep.  I suspect their brains are working in a new way that they want to be a part of all the time.  Everything is new and wonderful and they actually understand things… like they realize they can replicate things like clapping hands and they’re trying their voices and starting to  feel like they’re communicating with you some by doing so.  They getting more in touch with their emotions and just growing at a pretty incredible pace.  It’s all very exciting!… so why stop just to SLEEP!!!  That’s boring!  <sigh>

But, I’m not expert, I’m just guessing… and doing so with only 5 hours of sleep…

However, with neither of us having more than 5 hours of sleep, we persevered through a very long day.  This turned into a somewhat expected long night.  At almost three hours late, The Boy finally went to sleep.  It’s now closing in on 30 minutes, but there’s a nice thunderstorm rolling in, so we’ll see how long it lasts.