My Holidays

Since the nanny took off 2.5 days during Christmas, we did not end up doing much either. We had a lunch gathering at home the day after Christmas, and we took Winston around a few times. Other than that, I concentrated on Winston’s “sleep training” during the holidays – it’s not exactly what one would expect to do during the holidays!

Before I had Winston, I never heard of the term “sleep training”. But now I feel that I know too much about it. Since Winston was rocked to sleep every day for the first 6 months of his life, I was told that I had to train him to fall asleep on his own naturally at some point, or else he will want to be held and rocked for a long time. As he’s now weighing over 20 pounds at just 6 months, can you imagine how heavy he will be when he’s 1 year old? Besides, babies that fall asleep on their own can easily go back to sleep on their own when they wake up in the middle of the night or in the middle of a nap. It’s true that the nanny had to hold him for a long time if he woke up in the middle of his nap, and it became quite tiring as he became more and more sensitive to his environment and would wake up the second he's put back into his crib.

A lot of parents have used the method “cry-it-out” to train their babies to fall asleep on their own. But I just did not feel that I could possibly stand listening to him crying for 30 minutes to an hour. Some friends told me that they literally thought that their babies would die, but after 45 minutes, they did fall asleep. The next night the crying was a lot shorter. And eventually they did fall asleep by themselves peacefully and happily. I admit that I am an especially protective mother, and the thought of having to endure his crying just made me shudder. So I procrastinated on the sleep training, until the night after he got his flu shots. He woke up every hour during the whole night, and I could not sleep at all. Of course, it might have been due to the pain related to the shots, but I realized then that I had to sleep train him.

I braced myself for an unbearable night. I hugged him after changing his diaper, and I held him in the rocking chair, reading him a story, while turning on the musical mobile. I put him down in the crib, and he stared at the musical mobile above him. After a couple of minutes, I turned the musical mobile’s light off and switched it to heartbeat, and left the room. He suddenly realized what’s going on and started crying. Previously, just a minute of crying at most would get him attention, so his cry was not so bad at the beginning. Then it got worse and worse, and I felt that my heart was going to break into pieces listening to him crying hysterically, intermittent with coughing. I almost could not listen to the cry and yet I would not want to be anywhere else but next to his door. So I kept looking at the clock, thinking that if he did not stop crying for another 10 minutes, I would go in and comfort him. His crying went up and down, and just when I thought that he was about to be finished, he resumed his agonizing crying, to the point that I really felt that I could not take it any longer. As I was about to open his door, he stopped crying, and my hand stopped turning the door knob at that moment. He moaned a little bit, and then I did not hear any more noise from him.

My first thought was, “oh I hope that he’s not dead.” Of course, he was not. When I went in a few minutes later to check on him, he was sound asleep. His chubby face always looks so peaceful and beautiful when he’s asleep.

Oddly, a famous line from FDR came to mind, “The only thing to fear is fear itself.” I had feared sleep-training Winston for over 2 months, and when I could overcome my fear, I realized in the end that it was doable, even by a soft-hearted mother like myself. We can all overcome ourselves, if we dare to challenge ourselves.