Invasion of the Sleep Snatcher

Over the past six weeks or so Eidan has gone from getting up just once or twice a night to getting up about once every hour. Maria and I have become massively sleep deprived as a result. It’s amazing how little sleep you can get by with, once you adapt yourself to it. I’m not suggesting you try it though: when I say “get by” I mean you have to avoid meetings (as you’ll definitely fall asleep just sitting around listening to people talk), you probably shouldn’t drive, and forget about anything that involves the use of medium term memory (i.e. you can remember last year just fine, and you can remember 30 seconds ago just fine, but anything in between…maybe not).

We went through the same thing with Kai, and agonized over what to do about it. The one thing we weren’t prepared for as parents was how to deal with sleep problems. It’s the one aspect of parenting where you’ll find wildly different advice from all sorts of people with “MD” or “PhD” after their name. The advice ranges from “cry it out” to “the family bed” and everything in between. Reading online parents’ forums didn’t help either, as we found they were populated mainly by parents who were at their wits end (and therefore probably not the best sources of advise), and by folks I can only describe as “family bed” militants, who seem to believe there is a special circle of hell reserved for parents who let their infants cry.

We started four nights ago with the Ferber method, and we’ve been making good progress. Eidan is down to one hour-long wake up per night now (11-12 last night; 2-3 the previous night). We would have started sooner, but Maria’s mom was visiting, and we didn’t want to keep her up (not to mention that she vehemently disagrees with the Ferber approach…).

Personally, I’ve learned that I’m addicted to sleep: give me less, and I want more; give me more, and I want more ;-). Here’s to the whole family sleeping through the night by the end of the week!