Sleeping with a toddler is like sleeping with a drunk octopus who is looking for their keys. I read this somewhere on the internet and no truer words have ever been written. My little one crawls into bed with me every single night. She has never, not once slept a whole night in her own bed. I have no idea why. She is four-and-a-half. That is more than 1,600 nights in a row of not getting eight hours of shut-eye.
We’ve bought her several different types of beds, night lights, and stuffed animals. In some ways, I shouldn’t complain, I’m her safe space but I just wish she didn’t move around so much in her sleep and her feet didn’t always somehow end up in my back.
LAST WEEK’S THE STICKY FILES: Boobies, babies and boos
My baby was starting to go down the same path. I co-slept with both of my children because I was too lazy to get up in the middle of the night to nurse them. My second one, who is a year and half now, was refusing to sleep anywhere but beside me. Our bed was getting squishy and my husband and I were not getting much sleep. Bedtime was also a complete gong-show. I dreaded it. It took hours to get them both down.
We recently decided to sleep train the little one (the older one is a lost cause.) I know sleep training is a hotly debated topic and very controversial. I would have never imagined sleep training my first born. The thought of letting my baby cry for even a minute made me sick. But I was getting very little sleep and the worst part was that I was always grumpy and taking it out on my older daughter.
So, not only was I dead tired, but I felt so guilty. I was not the kind of mom I wanted to be or frankly, who my kids needed me to be. I finally decided to try sleep training. I stole my sister’s sleep training guide because she had already paid for it and had amazing results with my nephew.
I did a ton of research, read every single blog on sleep and discussed it with my doctor. I even looked into hiring a sleep consultant but decided I could do it on my own after seeing how much they cost. I didn’t think you could put a price on beauty sleep but apparently you can. One celebrity endorsed sleep trainer was having an end of summer sale, $500 US dollars. I was desperate but not that desperate. (No judgments if you go that route, you gotta do what you gotta do, mama!)
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The first night was hard but we did it. The second night was harder but on the third night something clicked, it was working. We are a couple of weeks into it now and I’m so happy that I sleep trained her. Bedtime is no longer a complete disaster, the little one almost sleeps through the night and I feel much better which in turn lets me be a better mom.
While this sounds like an ad for some sleep training program, it isn’t. There are no affiliated links to click. The first (and so far only) time the baby slept through the night last week, I wanted to shout it from a mountain top. I felt like running a marathon the next day. Sleep is such a beautiful thing.