I’m not trying to tell you that what you are doing is wrong, or will even be an issue, but I have observed that doing something now because it seems like the easiest can frequently lead to more problems down the road. This is particularly true with respect to disciplining children.
Of course, I am also a big believer in the saying “You have to pick your battles,” so this may be one of those things.
And we were definitely not the let the kids sleep with us type. In large part because we wanted to get the most people the best sleep which is frequently one parent and one kid (the one parent changing depending on what’s going on) versus no parents actually having a good night.
I wish someone had really hammered this home for us with regards to our kids’ sleeping. Neither of our kids slept through the night until 4/5 years old. We weren’t willing to do what we had to do to make it happen earlier. I spent 8 solid years barely functional. I’ve only been getting good sleep for the last two years, honestly.
My kids slept through the night as soon as they didn’t need a feeding. They cried like crazy for a few nights and it was really hard to ignore, but it’s been great ever since
Things were really…not great in the night when we tried to do the “right” thing. Lots of stress, tears, and frustration all around. There were also some health circumstances and wife was nursing and struggled with that and work. Finally we said eff it and did what worked for us because it was survival at that point. Kid rarely sleeps with us since age 2, only when scared or unwell.
As i said, if my son had been first, we might have done that, too. But even when she was tiny, we weren’t getting any sleep with our daughter in the bed. So we were never tempted.
That’s what we did, too. I don’t know how long i would have slept through their crying, but my husband woke up faster.
As for teaching them to get back to sleep on their own, once they didn’t need a middle-of-the-night feeding, we just were slow to act when they cried. We never left them alone “until they stopped”, we just gave them a chance to stop on their own.
The kids still woke up sometimes, they just didn’t cry for us unless they needed something. I remember waking up to pee, and hearing the “click click click” of my daughter playing with blocks in her crib as i tiptoed past her room.
I suppose we got used to sleeping when they cried early. My daughter had colic, and would sometimes cry for extended periods for no obvious reason, and no comforting made her stop. We started with the cradle in our bedroom. But one night, when she cried and cried, and we couldn’t comfort her, my husband dragged the cradle to the farthest corner of the apartment. So we always knew that “go to the kid” might not be the best move.
No need to explain yourself. You have to do what is best for you. I was just sharing because, as NA noted, this is not always something new parents recognize.
We did this too and it worked for us. Thankfully it was in the days of digital clocks. We’d give it 10 minutes.
I should clarify that it worked when she was healthy. If she was sick with a cold or ear infection it didn’t. We’d always have to retrain her after that.
I get I’m a mediocre parent, but I wasn’t complaining about a current issue but said how we handled a previous one that’s not a problem anymore. Or at least I don’t view a sick or scared kid seeking out comfort from a parent in the night to be a problem.
This was tricky with my youngest because just as he was getting old enough to start doing proper sleep training he was getting tubes to deal with his frequent ear infections so he has been a bit later than his siblings although he’s just about through the night now in his crib at 13 months old.
The very nearly 3 year old was pretty quick to train but has recently regressed back a bit so that was a little bit of a struggle. I’d remembered back to coming out of my room as a kid and seeing my dad sitting at the top of the stairs reading which caused me to turn back around and go to sleep so I’ve used that method a couple times recently with some success.
As an aside, this super-long Grant biography has been a good read thus far.
The recent trouble with the near-3-year-old has been getting up ridiculously early. He came into our room a few times last night and was basically ready to start the day at about 4:30.
My niece has done this. Apparently at home they have a “wake up clock”. It lights up when she’s allowed to get up (so some normal time like 7:30 or so). If she wakes up and Mommy & Daddy are still sleeping and the clock hasn’t lit up either, she can go to the bathroom but then she has to try to go back to sleep.
You know we had one of these for a while that seemed to work OK and then it ran out of battery and we’d lost the charger but perhaps something worth revisiting…
Bump. Need a new mattress and box springs or foundation or whatever. In a queen, the house is old and the bedroom is small and no way a king is going in, we measured.
We don’t want a full latex bed, my wife wants a little springiness, but a hybrid is fine. She was on a trip recently and slept on a Saatva and loved it so much she peeled back the sheets to see what it was. Leesa mattresses also seem popular and Costco has one at a great price.
I don’t know, we aren’t all that picky but both of us have back pain. Unsure on budget, let’s say $2,500 unless there’s a real benefit to something more expensive.
If it were up to me I’d get a DIY mattress, that would let me fiddle with different layers but my wife says that’s weird.