Sleep baby, sleep

The most exciting thing that's going on around here these days is that Augie's sleep has improved dramatically. By "dramatically", I mean that two nights ago he slept for 11 hours without a feed. Two weeks ago, we were lucky to get three hours. We’ve made two major changes to get to this point, though the second has been by far more powerful than the first.

The first is that we switched to a Montessori bed - essentially, just a mattress on the floor (and what Montessori herself calls a “child-bed”). Augie has never liked his crib, and here in Stockholm he essentially refused to sleep in one. I’m sure the grandparents here are going wild with reasons why this is a horrible idea, but for our family it’s been fantastic. Although Augie has the freedom to come and go into the bed day and night, he stays in bed all night and during his naps. The bedroom is safe for him, so if he were to wake up without us noticing (unlikely, as it’s only a one-bedroom apartment) and start playing, he’s not likely to hurt himself. I think the freedom/independence that the bed gives him is great for all of us.

The more important change is that I’m no longer sleeping in the bedroom (I’m on the living room couch). I noticed many months ago that if Augie woke up at night in his crib, looked around and didn’t see me in the bed, he’d often lie down and go back to sleep (while I hid, breathlessly, under the covers). But if he were to see me, he expected to be fed. So we wanted to move him into his own room months ago, but we knew that when we arrived in Sweden, we’d all be in the same room again; we thought it would be worse for him to go back and forth between his own room and our room.

The situation now is that he goes to bed in his child-bed, and then when it’s our bedtime, James gets into our bed next to his and I sleep on the couch. The first night we did this, Augie woke up as usual but was able, after some crying, to put himself back to sleep (knowing that Baba was there and he wasn’t abandoned). This pattern has continued for the past few days, but with the development that he gets himself back to sleep more easily now and doesn’t need Mama until about 8-11 hours after he’s gone down. (It’s very dry here, so Baba gives him small sips of water sometimes when he wakes overnight). I still can’t believe that he went 11 hours two nights ago without a feed! And then last night, he didn't have any overnight wake-ups at all until 5am, and after a feed, he went back to sleep until almost 8am.

We do let him cry at night, but we don’t let him “cry it out.” That technique has always seemed wrong for me and my family, but that doesn’t mean that our choice has been to coddle the baby and always give in to everything he wants. We let him cry, but if he’s getting deeply upset, we help.

We're also transitioning from two naps per day to just one nap; it was getting harder and harder to get him down for his first nap, and then several days in a row he just skipped his second nap altogether. Yesterday was the first day that we did just one nap on purpose (rather than him fighting a nap that I'm trying to put him down for), and it was great. Today he crawled onto our bed at 11:15 and played around for about 20 minutes before he started to cry. I went in and he was sitting on the bed, looking at me with desperation in his eyes and signing "milk, milk, gimme the goddamn milk!" I nursed him and he went to sleep.

Wish us continued luck!

And a teaser for tomorrow's post: