The sleep thing

Isaac is 21 months old today. Out of the last 21 nights, he has slept through the night 14 times -- including the last eight nights running.

It was about three weeks ago that I first wrote about Isaac sleeping through the night. At that point it had only been two nights running, but even though it was a little soon to be declaring a trend, I stand by my initial enthusiasm. After all, prior to those two nights he had only ever slept through the night once, or maybe twice.

Bedtime began changing about two and a half months ago, when instead of consistently falling asleep after his evening nursing, Isaac occasionally stayed awake and said "Go bed" instead. Even after this development, it took him a while to learn how to actually fall asleep by himself, but he's finally getting the hang of the sleep thing. These days, more than two-thirds of the time after the evening nursing he asks to be put to bed -- "No more milk," he says. "Lie down." After I set him down in his bed and tuck him in, I sit in a chair on the other side of his room, where I don't say or do anything. Meanwhile, Isaac drinks some water, shifts position a bit, and talks to himself (which is extremely entertaining, by the way). After about ten minutes of this, he falls asleep.

Even after 14 nights, each time I put Isaac into bed awake I don't believe he will tolerate it -- I still expect him to cry, to clutch at me, to wail "Mama, more milk!" Even after 14 mornings, each time I wake up I am shocked to see that it is already light outside -- I still expect to be summoned for nursing at least once during the night. I had assumed that Isaac would learn to sleep on his own and through the night eventually, but now that it's happened it seems like a minor miracle. And, even better, he learned it all on his own.

Right from the start, Isaac needed help with sleep. He was one of those newborns who only napped while being held, and as he got older he still had trouble falling asleep and then getting back to sleep after waking up during the night -- these were the only times he cried hard, the only times he seemed unhappy. We didn't feel comfortable leaving him to cry for long periods of time, so we never made any effort to "sleep train" him. Well, maybe there were a few nights when we were really exhausted, so we turned off the baby monitor and tried to ignore his cries. And there were one or two nights when I stood by the crib, patting Isaac's back as he sobbed and tried to climb up my arm. But after ten or 20 (or more) minutes of continuous screaming it just didn't seem likely that he was going to fall asleep, so in the end we decided not to waste our precious sleep time -- the quickest and surest method to get Isaac to sleep was to pick him up and nurse him (or rock him, which Craig did on many occasions). Compassionate? Perhaps. Lazy? Absolutely.