Dearest darling, you know you want to sleep...
You know you want to rest soundly in your pink-and-green cherry blossom bedding, and on your pillow, in its embroidered princess pillowcase from Renee-Renee.
But no, you simply love to pop your head up every few minutes to see if I am still sitting by your crib watching you; and so, I attempt to creep quietly out of the room until our next rendezvous.
You love to be put in your "Jenny Lind" crib at 7:30 p.m. and wake-up around midnight and call for us to come and watch you sleep some more...and so we do.
For over a year I have been attending to the after-midnight shift, and your Daddy has the before-midnight shift. That was my choice...when he tried to do the later shift, he would have you up and out of that crib reading books or playing or rolling around on the floor; he just couldn't be the bad guy and tell you to go back to sleep...leave that for Mommy! Humph.
So, some months you wanted to be up every hour of the night, checking for us to come and get you. I suppose you had already slept a good 6 hours and were ready to tinker. Meanwhile, I had been getting an average of 3 hours of sleep at a time for about eighteen months!
I did cheat quite a bit on the sleep-training; I will be the first to admit that.
They said to let you cry it out as long as you wanted; well, after several nights of non-stop crying, I cracked under the pressure and started going in your bedroom to check on you and fix your pillow, calm you down, wipe your tears or your throw-up.
I would go in every ten minutes...for hours.
Where is Daddy? Oh, he's in the back room, sound asleep!
They said to let you cry for ten minutes or more when you awakened in the night, that perhaps you would roll over and go back to sleep? You (and I) do not take kindly to that kind of treatment. It is impossible to hear you cry from your crib in the middle of the warm, safe, wee hours of the morning...I am still like an arrow shooting in the dark, even now at your ripe little age of 22 months.
I would pray as I sat on that pink ottoman...pray to Jesus, the Angels, for peace, for anything and everything if only your sleep was uninterrupted throughout the night! I was even certain that having you baptized in your Great, Great Grandparents Catholic Church would break the spell!
No, no, and no...
