Under the tyrannical rule of a wakeful dictator
ADVISORY WARNING: Some people find the stories of other people's children's sleeping habits incredibly boring. If this is you, please don't read the rest of this post. Instead click here to listen to a hilarious interview with comedian Aziz Ansari on NPR's Fresh Air. Not got 20 minutes to kill? Then what are you doing reading blogs, anyway?
Anyway, as I was saying, Harvey has been sleeping poorly as of late. A few months ago, which in sleep deprivation time reads like several hundred million years, Harvey was doing great with an eight-hour stretch followed by two quick wake-ups two hours apart. Life was good.
But then Harvey started pushing his bedtime later and later, and his first wake-up earlier and earlier, and before we knew it we were up every two hours every night as if we had a two-month-old.
We put him to bet at seven and he's up at nine. Then eleven. Then at one, three, five... any hour that isn't divisible by two. Every time he wants milk, and every other time I make him endure a diaper change. To save any semblance of parental functionality in the household, Dan has been sleeping on the couch downstairs. He still wakes up when the baby cries, so the situation is far from ideal, but the alternative is worse. If Dan and I are both in the bed with divergent opinions about what to do with a screaming baby, then it quickly dissolves into fisticuffs.
Before you offer your suggestions, here's what we've tried. We nailed down our evening routine so that every night we feed him, bathe him, have quiet down-time and then nursing. After that, Dan rocks Harvey to sleep while he screams at the top of his lungs. Harvey that is, not Dan. Dan is patiently singing in the face of the harshest critic he has ever seen.
So Harvey's got a belly-full of food, he's clean and relaxed, and he's at the break-down point of tired. He finally falls asleep, but it still won't carry him through to the am. What gives? People have suggested tooth troubles, but he's not fussy during the day! Today grandma suggested that it might be constipation, because the only time in a month that he slept six hours straight was when he did so in a pile of his own feces. I say terrible coincidence, not causality. After all, it's not like he wakes up and poops a storm. In fact, he doesn't usually make number two at all until the afternoon. And he's a happy boy all morning. He should be - he gets to be awake!
So I open it up to your wisdom, internet. Any ideas on saving our marriage and getting the little guy to sleep? Other than the classic T&T concoction? Time and Tylenol? I'll hear your suggestions in the comments.