Simon, at the grand age of 28 months, has decided to go from one three-hour nap in the afternoon to no nap. In a classic case of bad timing, this is coinciding with Beloved being home with the boys almost full-time. I’m not even going to bother with a description – you can imagine what it’s like.<\/p>\n
Saturday and Sunday, I tried all the tricks in my arsenal to get him to take his nap. A tiny, childish part of me figured that Beloved just wasn’t trying hard enough to get Simon down, that’s why he couldn’t get him to nap. Right. Not so much.<\/p>\n
For at least two hours each day, Simon was in his crib (yes, we’re still dragging our heels on that transition, too – give me a break, we just retired the highchair yesterday)<\/em> in varying states of wakeful agitation. He would lie peacefully for stretches, which I realize in retrospect was to lull us into a false sense of accomplishment, and then move through the spectrum of annoyance all the way to raging tantrum and back again. <\/p>\n Sitting on the top stair, listening to him pitch a wailing tantrum on the other side of his door and hoping it was a short-lived prelude to an actual nap (idealist to the end, I am), I was thinking back to the early days, and the first times I had to let the boys cry themselves to sleep. Letting my tender, innocent ten month old baby cry for five minutes seemed like such a horrendously hard thing to do, but in retrospect teaching the boys to fall asleep on their own was one of the best things we could have done. (Hmmm, best choice = hardest road. Who knew?)<\/p>\n Tristan, always my good sleeper, was outraged at being left to cry <\/a>for the first few nights but was happily falling asleep on his own within a week. Simon, who taught me what sleep deprivation really means by not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch well past his first year, was a lot more reluctant to be ‘sleep trained’. The first few nights that he cried himself to sleep, he continued to do that post-hysterical-crying hitching thing long after he fell asleep, and it took many days of heart-hardening resolve to convince him to fall asleep on his own.<\/p>\n I give a lot of credence to our eventual success with the infamous “cry it out” method to Richard Ferber’s classic sleep book, Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems.<\/em> I hated the idea of letting the babies cry at the time (anybody remember that episode of Mad About You <\/a>on this? I thought they were nuts.) but after reading everything on the market at the time, Ferber was the only thing that made sense, and it worked for us. <\/p>\n The weekend Citizen<\/em> carried a great reprint from Slate <\/a>magazine (click through and read it, it’s a great piece) about the re-issuance Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems<\/em>, where Ferber clarifies his position on sleep training. I loved this article, mostly because it perfectly encapsulates everything I learned from Ferber. And I’m hugely relieved that he has not, in fact, recanted <\/a>his original advice. In retrospect I realize that my own personal discipline style is strongly rooted in his “you might not like it but I’m the boss and I know best” style. From Ferber I learned to stand up to my children’s willfulness, and that’s probably one of the most valuable parenting lessons I’ve learned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Simon, at the grand age of 28 months, has decided to go from one three-hour nap in the afternoon to no nap. In a classic case of bad timing, this is coinciding with Beloved being home with the boys almost full-time. I’m not even going to bother with a description – you can imagine what … Continue reading “Crying it out”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}