Shh.

I'm going to tell you something that no mother in her right mind should ever say to anyone, let alone the World Wide Web.  I have a lot of fear telling you all this.  I worry about what the fallout will be.

*Deep breath*

OK.  Here it goes.  At 18-month-old Bear will finally go to sleep without a bottle and without crying.  He sleeps through the night most night, until 7:00AM.  He doesn't need a bottle, he stays in his crib instead of coming in with me and he seems no worse for the wear.  It's amazing and wonderful and I fear I've now ruined it.  I fear that since I've blogged about it, beginning tonight he will once again wake up two or three times a night demanding a bottle, throw a tantrum when I lay him down and wake up for the day before 6:00AM.

Sleep.

Is there anything else that a new (or newish) mother thinks about more?  Fantasizes about more?  Wishes for more?  One of the things new mothers don't hear enough is that, no matter what, you will constantly feel like you aren't doing a good job, at least in some area.  For me that area was sleeping.  I have friends with babies that slept through the night with no problem at four months and hearing those stories inevitably threw me into a tailspin.  Why wasn't Bear sleeping through the night?  Why did he cry so much when I laid him down?  What was I doing wrong?  I consider myself a follower of the attachment parenting philosophy but I couldn't get past the idea that I was somehow failing because he wasn't sleeping.  Attachment parenting looks at night waking as normal but I couldn't stop beating myself up over it.  My anguish was amplified by my lack of sleep.

After almost a year and half though, it seems a corner has been turned.  I don't know exactly what happened but I suspect a change in routine for the better has played a large part.  When I still worked it was difficult to stay on a consistent bedtime routine.  There was simply too much to do and not enough hours in the day.  I think my being gone was very disruptive for Bear too.  When I got home Kent was almost literally walking out the door.  The atmosphere was very chaotic and, I think, upsetting for a little baby who didn't understand why one of his parents was almost always gone.  For parents that don't have another choice but to both work, or parents that are single, they have my admiration.  Doing this with a spouse who earns a good living so I can stay home makes our lives immeasurably easier and I am so grateful.

I'm hoping the good sleep continues so that for the next five months of my pregnancy I can get some decent rest.  Modify that to read: as good a night's sleep as a pregnant woman can get.  I can still sleep on my stomach (my preferred sleep position), but at 19 weeks those days are numbered in a serious way.  If I make it to 22 weeks I'll be very surprised.  Then there's the issue of waking to, um, go...you know and the restless legs.  I swear that happened because I spent years making fun of restless legs as a made up disease.  Whoops!  Make sure your words are sweet because you might have to eat them, as the saying goes.

If any other moms out there are reading this in a sleep-deprived haze I want to promise you that things should get better.  Your baby will sleep through the night eventually.  Even though I said that we follow an attachment-parenting philosophy we found that sleep improved when we began to do some of the practices outlined in Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.  The hardest thing, undoubtedly, was getting Bear to stay in his crib.  Even though I love him in bed next to me he (and I) sleep better when he's not there.  It's bittersweet.  I miss him during the night but I know that it's not healthy for him to wake up numerous times of me and it doesn't do me any favors as a mom either.

So here I am, at 10:00PM getting ready for sleep after laying down my sweet baby at 7:30.  Maybe it's no coincidence that I was able to think about blogging again when sleep returned to our lives.  If that's the case you can look for another long-hiatus beginning in mid-April (although I sincerely hope not).  *g*