Sleep training

I've never before realized how vital sleep is to a person until I had a new baby.  In college, we tend to pride ourselves on the fact that we can pull all nighters and still make it to class the next day.  But there is just something about constant interrupted sleep that just pulls a person down.  I recently met a great lady who recommended the book "The Sleep Lady's Good Night Sleep Tight" by Kim West.  I welcomed it during the nap-less days with my toddler son.  But with a new baby, it has been really great to help me as I train her to sleep through the night.  I was just talking to a friend who mentioned older children that she knows that still have trouble sleeping through the night because they were never taught at a young age to do so.  Last night I tried some of Kim's suggestions with my almost 3 month old.  She is breastfed and sleeps pretty well...but she still wakes 1-3 times per night to eat.  I decided to try to get her back to sleep first before rushing to feed her.  Obviously if she was hungry and signaled that she wanted to eat I was ready to feed her...but she ended up going all night without eating.  Granted, I was up every couple hours offering her paci and shushing her...but she barely cried and slept wonderfully!!!!  I hope that as she learns to put herself back to sleep, I won't have to get up as much.  And, when I was up...it was only for a minute or two.  There may be differing opinions on this...but it worked for us and I'm happy about that.  Do you have a child with sleep difficulties?  Kim West gives advice on children from birth to age 5.  She offers a gentle approach that neither spoils the child nor leaves them to scream for hours on end ;-)

He's making something new...again

The smell of Desitin fills my brain as I think back on my day of horrible diaper rash, a day of horrible, painful screams, and a recovering ear infection of my little man, Micah.  It started at 5:30am, and we didn’t make it to church.  I was dressed and almost ready, then just dropped everything and decided to stay home at watch Pearl Harbor…sacrilegious?  Irreverent?  Perhaps…I don’t know.  I just know that I didn’t have the energy to get it all together and show up (very late…I might add after realizing all that I still had to do to get there).  To add to it, I’m feeling more and more like a crippled old woman…being almost 8 months pregnant and sore all over!  (Don’t worry, the point of this post is not to whine and complain…I’m getting somewhere).  So I’ve had some time to reflect after baby was put to bed (quite easily…thank you Lord) and Daniel was back at the church.  The thing that popped into mind was on Thanksgiving day, after I completed and ate my first complete Thanksgiving dinner and was feeling quite sore.  Micah was attempting to nap…but it wasn’t going well.  I went to his room to practice the “Sleep Lady Shuffle” (I will talk about this in a future post…great book about sleep issues and children) and sat in my rocking chair to calm him and wait for him to go back to sleep.  While rocking…the most amazing contentment and calm rushed over me.  (I don’t EVER feel that way when I’m trying to help Micah sleep…normally it is straight ANXIETY and feelings of failure).  All of a sudden, all I wanted to do was just to be there…watching my son sleep and the sudden urge came to pray for a few specific needs of people in my life.  The point is, that God showed up…there in that dark room filled with lullabies and the sound of rain…though I’ve been struggling with Him and trying to find my place in this new phase of my life called motherhood…He came.  I knew He would…wasn’t sure when.  So tonight, it occurred to me that He is making something new in me…again.  Just when I felt that I had things under control, my world was flipped…as it turns out, He’s still working on me.