Sleep and dreams of sleep

About three weeks ago, I finally hit a wonderful milestone in this parenting journey: I gave up on getting any truly good sleep. It was liberating, believe it or not. Now, the truth is that, as I will explain in this blog, I want better sleep for Ella and me. HOWEVER, what I have come to accept is that it is going to take some more non-sleep to get to better sleep. And I'm willing to put in the man hours.

That's not to say that Ella is a horrible sleeper, but she doesn't sleep well. She's still waking up several times a night, at least two (last night it was 4), and around 4 AM she becomes a wiggle worm that can't calm back down unless she's sleeping on me. This has not bothered me over the last month and a half, until I realized that neither of us should be up and restless at 4 AM AND sleeping in a recliner, and I abruptly decided that she's old enough and I'm ready enough to sleep better. The final straw was when she woke up at 11:45 last night, cried enough for me to go in, and when I went into her room, she was just looking around, whining for Mommy to come spend some time with her.

Now, everyone has an opinion on how to make this sleep thing happen. A few I've heard are: do whatever it takes to get her to sleep, leave her completely alone and let her cry it out, do something in the middle like laying her down in her crib and just rubbing her back for 3 minutes and then leave the room. The list goes on and on. And I truly have no idea what to do.

So...I'm in the middle of reading the famed child-sleep book "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child", recommended by lots of people (too many to name) who seem to know about kids and sleep. So far, it has spent 170 pages describing how unfortunate it is to have a baby with colic (which we did) and how hard it is to get a post-colicky baby to sleep (which it is). I haven't been offended, but I can't say that I've been at all uplifted by this news. Interspersed in those 170 pages are lots of warnings about how the parents are the ones to make bad sleep habits for their post-colicky baby, not the baby herself. This is as far as I've gotten...no solution mentioned yet, although I think it's coming in the last 170 pages.

So, what I've decided is to make this my new project: getting Ella to sleep better. I'm going to try one new thing every few days or every week, making sure to give it time to sink in, and see if I can't solve the sleep problem. So far, I've been trying to put her down for three good naps a day, and last night I put her down for bed at 7:15 PM, earlier than normal. She woke up 4 times, but I'm giving it a few more days. After all, I've been liberated!