{"id":791,"date":"2006-12-11T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-12T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/2006\/taking-the-plunge\/"},"modified":"2006-12-12T10:41:44","modified_gmt":"2006-12-12T16:41:44","slug":"taking-the-plunge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/2006\/taking-the-plunge\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking the plunge"},"content":{"rendered":"

After months of questioning and reading about how to best help Lucy sleep, we were led into a new course of action on Friday. Let’s put it this way: there’s a smidge of crying involved. <\/p>\n

We had been considering letting Lucy “cry it out” for some time, especially since we were having no success with the other methods we’d been using to get Lucy through her “45-minute evening wake-up”:http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/2006\/lucys-troublesome-habit\/. But Lucy is such a passionate person that there’s already quite a lot of crying around here — did we want even more?<\/p>\n

But then on Friday night, Lucy walked us right into this new regime. She went to bed easily, as usual, but woke up at 45 minutes and just wouldn’t return to sleep. Nothing worked, not patting, not standing by her crib, not even nursing her to sleep! We had tried getting her out of bed at this point in the past, but she usually seemed extra tired for the next day. We had just been getting her on an even more regular schedule of naps than before, so she was well-rested. And Jon had just been reading up on the so-called “extinction” (or “let them cry”) method in Weissbluth<\/a>\"\". So the timing really seemed right, and we decided to let her work it out herself and see what happened.<\/p>\n

Lucy chatted to herself for about twenty minutes, then began to cry — not very hard, but consistently, with some pauses — for over two hours. Jon and I prayed for her, and then watched a “movie”:http:\/\/imdb.com\/title\/tt0196229\/ to get our minds off the crying. At some point, I started crying, too. I felt so sorry for Lucy, and I worried that our non-intervention would wound her in some way. But it seemed clearly to be the right step. We couldn’t do anything to help her get to sleep; she needed to do this herself. Her crying at bedtime is all protest: it sounds frustrated and mad and sleepy, not at all scared. And we knew that if we caved, it would just undo all of the hard work she had been putting in. (Consistency is more than half the battle here.)<\/p>\n

\"Taking<\/p>\n

p{color:gray}. Photo: Lucy, the day after her marathon sleep-protest.<\/p>\n

That night, I had a dream: we went on vacation with Lucy to a rustic lodge, and we had let her cry herself to sleep in the next room. In the dream, we went to get Lucy upon waking, and noticed that the footies on her pajamas were all shredded — it was the work of rats nibbling on her toes all night. Can you say, “maternal guilt”?<\/p>\n

In real life, Lucy awoke happy and refreshed, footies intact. The next evening, she cut the evening crying in half — only a little over an hour. And the third night she once again cut it down, almost in half again to about 40 minutes. We hope that she’ll keep slicing the minutes off till she doesn’t need to protest much at all in the evening.<\/p>\n

Each day she has had better naps and better night sleep over the past few days than she has in a very long time. She is routinely taking two-hour naps twice a day and getting about 12 hours of sleep at night. Lucy no longer gets very hyper or over-excited, and she seems clearly happier and “more smiley”:http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/2006\/happy-birthday-grandma\/ than ever.<\/p>\n

For me and Jon, this is a most welcome relief. We hadn’t realized just how tense our household was. Every night, we were on edge: would Lucy wake up after 45 minutes? would we be able to soothe her? or would we have to get her up to wear her out? It was hard for us to relax and do anything in the evenings. Now, we are even considering the possibility that we could get a babysitter and actually go out in the evenings, something we haven’t done (in the evenings) since Lucy was about “eight weeks old”:http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/2006\/first-date\/.<\/p>\n

I’m grateful that God led us into this new path and for all of the advice we received about different sleep methods. I’m conscious of the tension around the issue of sleep for so many moms. While I don’t think this style does or should work for everybody, I do believe that it is a very good choice for our family at this point. It has brought up some questions for me about my belief in my own power as a mother: Can I trust God to care for Lucy’s sleep in this way? Am I willing to release my desire for Lucy to not cry, if it means Lucy can get good sleep and be happy for the rest of the day? Can I relinquish my fears about her feeling abandoned, and trust that God will talk to me about that if need be? Can I allow Lucy to have the feelings she has, even if they make me uncomfortable or force me to question my power as her mother? I feel like God has put these questions on the blackboard for me, and it really fits with my growing edges these days.<\/p>\n

These are real questions, and for most parents finding the answers isn’t easy — even if it can look that way in retrospect.<\/p>\n

I really appreciated the wisdom I got from Deborah on the phone the other day: “You could always just try it for a week. If it doesn’t work well for Lucy or you, then you can do something else.” Her graciousness and encouragement reminded me that we weren’t going to break Lucy by letting her cry. If it didn’t work, we would apologize and Lucy would undoubtedly forgive us. (Good principles to remember for years to come.) As it turns out, we think our whole family might be more relaxed and better rested as a result. Who knew?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After months of questioning and reading about how to best help Lucy sleep, we were led into a new course of action on Friday. Let’s put it this way: there’s a smidge of crying involved.<\/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-791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791","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=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}