By: teri on October 27, 2009

Its that time again…

But first, here’s why I love keeping records. We’ve been telling everyone who asks “How’s AJ doing?” that he is wonderful blah blah blah, but he doesn’t sleep well like his brothers did. We go on to say that we were really blessed with Tyler because “the kid just slept” and we didn’t have to do anything about it. Both Norm and I have told people that.

Well, we have come to that point where we are going to attempt to teach AJ how to sleep. We’ve come to grips with the fact that it isn’t his bowels that are keeping him from sleeping or the caffeine I was drinking or any other exterior excuse. We were both stalling because we have this feeling that AJ is going to be a screamer and we aren’t looking forward to letting him cry. But two nights ago when he woke up crying and we tried to comfort him the only thing that got him to stop crying is when I turned on a light and put him in a sitting position. He immediately stopped crying, his eyes popped open and all was good. Except the fact that it was 1am and not time to be awake. It was then that I made the impulsive decision that it was time to teach him when we sleep. (But I’ll get to that in another post)

Back to the part about records.

After two nights of partial crying we decided we needed a plan of attack and some ground rules because I find it is easier if we have these things figured out before they happen at 2am when all we want to do is sleep so we give in to whatever is easiest to make that happen. I wanted to pull out any records I had of Jaxon’s and Tyler’s nights so we could take a look at what we did and how they progressed and such. Tonight I brought out what I wrote about Tyler. All that “we never had to teach Tyler anything, he just slept” stuff…. total crap! I have written down started at 4 weeks old us putting him in his crib and him crying a bit. Now granted, it wasn’t a lot of crying and he did sleep for large chunks (which AJ does not) but it didn’t just happen. The records for Tyler go from mid July to mid Aug and then stop. Then, in Nov 2007, they start up again. The top of the paper says “Its time to teach you to sleep” and each night there is a detailed account of what happened. Cry, pat, put paci in, sleep, wake, cry, rock, etc, etc. The nights we had with him sound exactly like AJ is right now.

The beauty of that is 1)how we don’t remember those nights for Tyler at all and can reasonably assume we’ll forget our current sleepless nights with AJ and 2)AJ can become just as great as a sleeper as both Tyler and Jaxon. Those records give me hope that sleep is in my future, and I definitely need that hope.