Wins and Losses with your nine month old
The sleep battle will be the first of many battles as parents.
As I'm writing this, my wife and I are waiting in our bedroom listening to the baby monitor to see if Kyrie will fall asleep on his own. And right now, watching through the video baby monitor, he's holding onto the side of the crib bouncing around and crying for our attention. My wife usually repeats to me "I hate this." when we're in other room hearing him cry incessantly. Our first instinct is to just go in there and soothe him until he goes to sleep.
This seems to be the first of many 'parenting battles' we will have as parents with him. A battle to see who will give in first. We did 'sleep training' when he was around five months which worked out well but over the last few months with some colds, teething, etc.,we've fallen short of being consistent.
We've been on the losing side of plenty of these sleep battles in the last nine months.
It's like the Toronto Raptors, six straight losing seasons and then this year....boom. They figured it out and have put together a winning season are headed to the playoffs.
Like the Raptors, we as parents want to figure it out, start to have parent 'wins' again and boost our self confidence as parents knowing that we've helped him develop the ability to put himself to sleep. Or I feel like we will be those parents with a five year old eating chocolate cake for breakfast.
There are so many methods out there on how to deal with the sleep battle but we want to take our own route and through trial and error, I think we'll figure it out.
Well, I hope so.
Right now our method is to let him cry it out a bit, wait around five minutes and then go in, pat his back to give him a bit of reassurance that we're still here. Then go back out to our bedroom, rinse and repeat. It sounds great in theory, but we end up on the 'losing' end most times and resort to rocking him to sleep in our arms or my wife resorts to the ultimate white flag, THE BREAST.
But there are those rare times, when he's tired and he lays down and goes to sleep on his own. And you feel like you won in some kind of weird way and feel proud of him.
Tonight though, this one went into overtime. It's over an hour past his bedtime, and he doesn't want to go down to sleep. We've finally surrendered and resorted to rubbing his back to get him to sleep. Our only win, our only saving grace from tonight was that we didn't have to resort to...THE BREAST.
A small victory is still a victory.
And at the end of the day, the hardest part is that you realize that he just wants to know that his parents are there when he falls sleep. This parenting thing ain't easy.
This seems to be the first of many 'parenting battles' we will have as parents with him. A battle to see who will give in first. We did 'sleep training' when he was around five months which worked out well but over the last few months with some colds, teething, etc.,we've fallen short of being consistent.
We've been on the losing side of plenty of these sleep battles in the last nine months.
It's like the Toronto Raptors, six straight losing seasons and then this year....boom. They figured it out and have put together a winning season are headed to the playoffs.
Like the Raptors, we as parents want to figure it out, start to have parent 'wins' again and boost our self confidence as parents knowing that we've helped him develop the ability to put himself to sleep. Or I feel like we will be those parents with a five year old eating chocolate cake for breakfast.
There are so many methods out there on how to deal with the sleep battle but we want to take our own route and through trial and error, I think we'll figure it out.
Well, I hope so.
Right now our method is to let him cry it out a bit, wait around five minutes and then go in, pat his back to give him a bit of reassurance that we're still here. Then go back out to our bedroom, rinse and repeat. It sounds great in theory, but we end up on the 'losing' end most times and resort to rocking him to sleep in our arms or my wife resorts to the ultimate white flag, THE BREAST.
But there are those rare times, when he's tired and he lays down and goes to sleep on his own. And you feel like you won in some kind of weird way and feel proud of him.
Tonight though, this one went into overtime. It's over an hour past his bedtime, and he doesn't want to go down to sleep. We've finally surrendered and resorted to rubbing his back to get him to sleep. Our only win, our only saving grace from tonight was that we didn't have to resort to...THE BREAST.
A small victory is still a victory.
And at the end of the day, the hardest part is that you realize that he just wants to know that his parents are there when he falls sleep. This parenting thing ain't easy.
Romy is a dad, husband and blogger based out of Halifax. He also writes about hoops too at HipHoopJunkies.com. For dirty diaper stories, follow him on Twitter @DadDontLie and for hoops talk, follow @RomyAquino
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