This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful we’re feeling better! One of the tough things about Bode when he’s sick is his expectation that I need to hold him all the time. While this was exhausting, I didn’t mind doing it because the poor kid needed sympathy as he coped with his first bout of the evil suffering of this world (at least that’s how he worded it, intermingled with a few expletives).
However now that he’s on the mend, it’s been rough trying to get him to stop being so clingy and needy. Since his sleep patterns have recently become so grisly, I had stopped rocking him to sleep in an effort to teach him to self-soothe on his own. And for the most part, it was working. Until he got sick, of course.
When Bode started to feel better, we knew it was time to start training him again. After he was fed, changed and ready for bed, we waited until he started dozing off and put him down. And then the flood works were unleashed because how DARE we put him down in his crib. By himself.
“Just let him cry,” Jamie advised.
“But what if something’s wrong?”
“We both know nothing’s wrong. He’s just tired and is demanding to be held.”
Though I’m not an advocate for the extreme “crying it out methods,” I am a staunch advocate for getting more than three hours of sleep. Something that hasn’t happened for more than a month and was probably the leading cause for getting me sick.
And so we let him cry. And cry. He never got to the hysterical stage (at which point I would’ve cracked) but simply voiced his displeasure. Over and over again.
But when he finally dozed off, he slept the longest block of time he’s done in a month (four hours straight). But not without frazzling us during the whole thing. When all was finally silent, Jamie leaned over to me and whispered:
“We’ve won!”
Because we need the occasional reinforcement that these children don’t rule us. At least not always.
That night, I had feverish dreams that I got knocked up at BYU with Bode and that Jamie abandoned us. I have this dream (and the one where I’m in my final semester of college and realize I’ve forgotten to go to class all semester) at least weekly.
I called Jamie the next morning to commiserate our cry-it-out evening. I ended our conversation with, “And you calloused jerk. How dare you?”
“Huh?”
I then relayed the knocked-up dream. You know: that same one I have had over and over.
Jamie paused and I waited for his reassurance I am indeed psycho and that he would never dump us off at BYU, a.k.a. the sappiest…errr happiest place on earth. But instead, his response:
“Well, after last night can you blame me?”
I'm a Canadian-born mom of two, former Denver Post columnist, family travel writer, editor of MileHighMamas.com and 9News contributor. Expert on all things Utah, Denver, family and travel. Lover of laughter and life. Happily married to a man obsessed with growing The Great Pumpkin. 