I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while – a check-in of how things are sleep-wise a year (and a bit) after all the sleep training.
The afternoon naps took quite a while to settle down. I remember that the nurses at Masada said that it could take up to five weeks, and I remember at the five week mark wondering when he was going to start having his afternoon nap reliably. It was a solid period of being very limited in our movements, really only going out over lunch time. After the initial buzz of energy, I also felt more tired than I expected, for longer than I expected. I think that it really took about 3 months of decent night sleeps before I recovered enough to feel like myself again. It was a gradual process, but it did happen. Fortunately the psychologist that I saw at Masada, and a couple of times subsequently, warned me that it would take a while, that I couldn’t expect myself to bounce back immediately.
Monsieur did eventually start having his afternoon naps, though the recommended two hours did not happen until he dropped his morning nap, sometime in February. Now, it feels like we’ve been on one big afternoon sleep a day for so long that I barely remember what it was like having to be home for two naps. He still naps in the afternoon, on average 2-3 hours, although he generally naps for just 90 minutes when he’s with his grandma. He goes down around 12:30, though this past week we had a couple of days where he didn’t get to bed until 1:30 and on those days he slept for three and a half hours. Incredible. The most amazing part of that though is that he is still ready to go to bed at 7pm, even if he only gets up from his nap at 5:15pm.
I can’t remember at what point he stopped waking before 6am – I think it was during last winter. But now it is unusual for him to wake before 6, and sometimes he’ll sleep as late as 7am!
He loves getting into bed, even if ten minutes earlier he has told me that he’s not tired. He snuggles under the doona with his cot friends and sometimes can’t get me out of the room quick enough. He loves to chat to his cot friends and sing for a while before going to sleep. Some nights, he can chatter away for an hour or so before falling asleep, but he is happy and never tries to get out of bed. I am so happy that the sleep training didn’t permanently take away his love of his bed.
He still wakes at night from time to time, generally he’ll wake three or four nights running, then stop again. He will ask “Mummy tap you” when he wants to go back to sleep and very commonly when he’s woken from a nightmare or from overheating. I love that the “tapping” technique I was taught at Masada has become a source of comfort for him. I suspect it will remain so for a long time to come. Every time I settle him with the tapping, as he calls it, I am grateful for the week at Masada.
I was also happy to discover that the weeks of sleeping in a completely blacked out room did not set him up to be unable to sleep in rooms with light. The transition back from a fully blacked out room happened gradually and naturally, as the tape attaching the cardboard to his windows slowly came away, letting more and more light in. I was worried with the transition to the in-laws house but thankfully never got around to blacking out Monsieur’s room there. Even with the blinds down, his room was quite light but it never seemed to give him any problems during his day nap. He was very sensitive to noise however, so we did spend a lot of the seven months living there walking around on tiptoes and speaking in whispers.
I did have one very fragile day where I was telling my pilates instructor about the house with floorboards and how quiet we had to be for Monsieur to be able to sleep. She commented that she had floorboards too and had no problems with her baby sleeping, and one of the other ladies in the group agreed and told me how they just went about their normal lives and the baby just learned to sleep through the noise. I just burst into tears and went to leave the class. My instructor convinced me to stay and was sorry but I think that it’s just too hard for anyone who has a baby who sleeps to understand the lengths you will go to in order to get your baby to go to sleep and stay asleep.
I never imagined that I would become *that* mother. Of course I’d heard about how you should do your vacuuming and have the washing machine going while your baby was asleep to get them used to the idea. Over the year and a half of sleep issues, I received so much well-intentioned advice on all the things that I should do. All the things that I could do which would make my baby sleep. Honestly, I have only really properly relaxed with his sleep since we moved back home post-renovation. Now that we are in a house where sound doesn’t travel, where I can close doors – plural! – between his room and me/the dishwasher/the washing machine/ the TV, where we are not in the middle of a busy inner city area, *now* I can relax while he sleeps and trust that he will keep sleeping.
It has been a long journey. In some ways, I still marvel at the concept of him sleeping and sleeping well, yet in other ways life has moved on and I started taking for granted again things which weren’t possible a year ago. Something which was highlighted after a dinner with friends in the city recently – they’d assumed that I’d driven, because I always did. I always wanted to have my car available so that I could get home as quickly as possible, if R called me, and to minimise travel time because there was only so much awake time in my evenings and I wanted that time to be with friends, not to be spent on trams. But for this dinner I’d hopped on a tram without a second thought. I just knew that Monsieur wouldn’t wake while I was out, and that if he did, R would totally be able to get him back to sleep and I knew that getting into bed later than 10pm wouldn’t completely wreck me for the next day. It is so nice to regain some normality and it will definitely help next time around to know that there is help available that doesn’t involve me sacrificing my relationship with my son (a true fear that I had about sleep training) and that there is and end to it. It doesn’t last forever and the world is so very bright when you and your child are getting sleep!
