Awake!
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 2:03 PM
We’re on vacation, which is wonderful. But two mornings ago, after having been awakened approximately seventeen times in the night by my beloved daughter, I remembered one thing that is bad about vacations: the interruption to the sleep routine. Camilla’s attitude about the whole thing seemed to be, “Mama, where the heck am I? I can’t sleep until I get this figured out.”
Unfortunately, that was also her attitude for the first twenty-two months of her life.
I know that there are many families that have it worse than a child who never sleeps consistently before twenty-two months old. I know this because in a fit of self-pity, I surveyed my own blog readers to help me snap out of it… and discovered that there are some children who don’t sleep through the night before they are five! God bless those children’s parents, is all I have to say about that.
Regardless, I’m not exaggerating when I say that sleep has been the number one challenge that Bryan and I have faced as parents.
In Paul Reiser’s hilarious book Babyhood, he writes about how people warned him about diapers, as if changing diapers were the most daunting thing about parenthood. He scoffs at these people, and avows that he would happily diaper his son into adulthood if he were guaranteed a solid eight hours sleep per night through that time.
Reading this before I became a parent, my reaction was, “Ewwwww!” By the time my daughter was fifteen months old and waking up more in the night than she had as a newborn, I strongly sympathized with Mr. Reiser.
There are as many different ways to handle sleep issues as there are children, and I’m convinced that you have to do whatever works for you as a family. But the fact is, some kids are naturally better sleepers than others. The first time around, we happen to have gotten one who wasn’t so good.
It’s fortunate that she’s so wonderful in every other way, to make up for it.
However, the very day that we found out about my current pregnancy, my husband added an intention to our evening prayers. “Bless our new baby… and let him be a good sleeper!”
We don’t want to take any unnecessary chances this time.
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