![\"img_7256\"](\"http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/img_7256.jpg\" "\\"img_7256\\"")
<\/p>\nWe’re at one of those points in parenting where we cry out for help. Every night at the Boyd house, we have some night wakings — but not just for the infant, the toddler too. We keep hoping that Lucy will get over it, the sooner the better. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
p{color:gray}. Photo: Happy enough during the day!<\/p>\n
Before Rosie was born, Lucy was a solid night sleeper — very rarely waking in the middle of the night, and usually only if she was ill. After her little sister came along, Lucy had a stretch of middle-of-the-night wakings. “Toddlers wake at night when they are anxious,” I read somewhere, and this made sense to me. And, even though we didn’t enjoy it, Lucy grew out of these night wakings. Mostly.<\/p>\n
The fact is, even though we’ve had weeks on end where Lucy doesn’t wake at night, most of the time we can expect to hear “Rock a little bit!” or “I’m awake!” two or three times a week. She’s almost never that upset (or frightened, for instance), just awake. She at least wants to be picked up and rocked in the rocking chair, and usually urgently demands to be sung to, as well (with particular repertoire in mind: “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” or “Edelweiss,” believe it or not). These night wakings generally seem unrelated to Rosie’s cries for mid-night feedings. Lucy often calls out at a totally different time of the night, although occasionally it seems that Rosie’s crying wakes her up a bit.<\/p>\n
There have been times — like this past week, when we were on vacation at our friends’ “lake house”:\/news\/2008\/vacation-for-four\/ — when Lucy has woken up about every two hours. One night, it came to five visits! Ack! However, it seems that the combination of sleeping in a tiny pack ’n’ play and staying at an unfamiliar house with ticking heat registers had something to do with her sleeplessness. Mine too, for that matter (although I wasn’t sleeping in a pack ’n’ play).<\/p>\n
We have noticed an increase in sleep disturbances around developmental growth periods, like “potty training”:\/news\/2008\/potty-training-weekend\/, or when we built the “big girl bed”:\/news\/2008\/lucys-big-girl-bed\/ in Lucy’s room. The tough thing is, we are on the cusp of more things like this — like graduating to underpants, and making the transition to actually _sleeping_ in the big girl bed — and we’re hoping to get through them with some stretches of sleep intact. I’ve read that, in some cases, children start sleeping _better_ after they make the switch to the big bed, but there are just as many instances of sleep patterns deteriorating, and I’m just a bit nervous about it. <\/p>\n
Bottom line: We’d really like to teach Lucy to put herself back to sleep all the time. This would be a special gift for Jon, who is on “Lucy duty” at nights.<\/p>\n
As for Rosie, she is doing quite well — definitely falling into more of a once-a-night feeding instead of twice-a-night. Even one night feeding feels like sort of a lot, especially at ten months old, but I think we often feel nervous about letting her cry for too long at night, risking disturbing Lucy’s sleep.<\/p>\n
I’m conscious that these are precious years with our very young daughters, and I try to find joy in each part, even the tough things. And while I do love the smell of Lucy’s freshly washed hair on the rare occasions that I, rather than Papa, snuggle her in the middle of the night, we’d all benefit from some extra sleep. How can we help her sleep solidly (or put herself back to sleep) during the night? Does anyone have any tips for us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’re at one of those points in parenting where we cry out for help. Every night at the Boyd house, we have some night wakings — but not just for the infant, the toddler too. We keep hoping that Lucy will get over it, the sooner the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3433"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3456,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3433\/revisions\/3456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}