Dear God, please add this clause in to your rules, and archive it in the ‘WTF?!’ files:
Sometimes babies like going to sleep.
Ta da!
I had heard this absurdity here and there in my travels through internet-land, and always I scoffed at it, and designated in my mind as internet drivel of a similar variety to this sort of thing.
Until it became a truth in my own household.
A couple of weeks ago (I have hesitated to write about this emerging phenomenon since then, for fear of jinxing it) I was feeding her to sleep and it was taking aaaages and for some reason I just thought to myself ‘I’ve had enough’ (it may or may not have had something to do with the presence of a bottle of cold white wine sweating on the kitchen bench). Unlatched her, put her in her cot.
She cried, but instead of it lasting long enough for me to go through my usual couple of cycles of the following:
This is wrong; I’m TOTALLY against cry-it-out … but maybe she’s just ‘singing herself to sleep’, as they say? … but the cortisol this shit produces is really bad for her … oh, but I just can’t FACE it tonight … but I want her to know I’m always there for her when she needs me … but maybe I’d make it worse by going back in there?
… Before I could go through that five and a half times, she stopped crying … And I went in a couple of minutes later and she was sleeping beautifully.
The next night: I did the same thing. She cried intensely – a shrill, piercing, deeply offended wail, like a male discovering what getting your armpits waxed feels like. But it lasted less than a minute, and then she calmed right down.
Night three: same procedure, but the shrill squealing lasted such a short time it was almost comical, like someone suddenly pushed the mute button.
Night four: I unlatched her and told her I was putting her in her own little bed. Not a peep out of her.
Night five: As she was feeding, she kept looking up at me, like she was waiting for the ‘own little bed’ moment. It came; I said ‘do you want me to put you in your own little bed?’ She said ‘Igen’ (Hungarian for yes), put her arm around Teddy, and let me pick her up and lay her down in her O.L.B.
WTF???
This bodes very well for the (ever-delayed) night-weaning project, no?
Daisy
