Sleeping through the night

Figuring out baby's sleep and how to manage your own life around it has been one of the hardest challenges of being a new parent to this point. Newborn babies can't really tell the difference between day and night and need to be fed very often, so as a new parent you're thrown into what is essentially a 24-hour, seemingly endless game of feed baby, play with baby, get baby to sleep, figure out why baby has woken up, crying and repeat. After the first week of this, the effect of sleep deprivation is real.

This all might have been a lot easier to deal with when we lived with large extended families and/or in close proximity to friends (tribes?) that also have young babies where the burden and knowledge can be shared, but it's a very big challenge for a small nuclear family far from home in the modern era. There are dozens of books and as many theories as what one should do or not do to make the process more manageable. Some theories have very detailed, impossible-to-follow age-dependent minute-based schedules attached to them and promise that your baby will be sleeping through the night in no time. Other theories have parents following the baby's lead and sleeping with their children in the same bed until they're 3 or 4 years old (or older!) And there's everything in between.

We were feeling pretty exhausted and confused after a few months of this when a close friend and mother of three was kind enough to offer to spend some time with us to see what was going on and offer her approach. Her theory is that babies need to join their parents' lives and that we shouldn't be taking the lead from a baby. He's a baby, not a leader. We needed to break the habit of an adult appearing within seconds of the baby crying and give him a chance to learn how to calm himself down and self-soothe on his own.

I won't go into the details, but suffice it to say we took her advice and after a week or two, found that our baby's sleep had massively improved. No longer was he waking up 40 to 45 minutes into every period of sleep crying and looking for someone to console him. And last night, I'm happy to share that he finally made it through an entire night from his midnight feeding until morning on his own.

If you don't have kids you might not understand, but its feel like a massive accomplishment for us as parents. And our son seems much more well-rested and happier during the day. Our days which were long stretches of sleep depreviation suddenly seem to be back to "normal." Taking care of our baby is no longer an all-hands-on-deck 24x7 job, but something not only manageable but enjoyable.