Resilience

H has never had trouble sleeping through the night. Getting to sleep? Well, that's another story. The first week he was home, he was off time schedule by a half day. I slept in his room on the floor. He would occasionally wake up and groggily make noise until I told him it was ok. Once he got his days and nights straightened out, though, things took a definite downhill turn. H would NOT go to sleep as long as we were with him. In the early days he would scream and cry. No whimpering for my boy but out and out screaming crying. I would rock him, I would hold him, I would sing to him, He would squirm and fight and cry. You are told to try and bond with your child - rubbing, lotion, warm baths, snuggling, rocking, all those things help soothe and attach..well not in our case.

We knew sleep was important. We knew that you weren't supposed to just let your child scream. H didn't know that though and it was tough. We finally had to just resort to putting him down, sitting quietly by his crib for a few minutes or 20 minutes (or longer if I fell asleep long before he did.) It was hard. Man it was hard. We had an unofficial time frame of no going back in for about 20 -25 minutes. Usually when you thought you couldn't take it anymore and he really wasn't going to go to sleep, he would drop off. I'm not sure if it was exhaustion or resignation that we weren't going to keep playing with him but he usually got there.

Our nap routine was similar: put him down, let him scream, hold out hope that it would end shortly, and on the occasion that it didn't, you just give up the good fight and go get him (and pay the consequences for a very tired baby.)

There were odd moments out that H would actually fall asleep during some activity, a night time bottle, a car ride, or a ride in the stroller. Whenever that happens, your only resort is to just let him sleep if at all possible in the position in which he fell asleep. If you attempt to move him, he wakes and screams. He's now had just enough sleep to NOT go back to sleep and not quite enough to have made him feel less tired. If you have to move him, well, you still get the scream fest so as I read not too long ago: don't try to make a happy baby happier....

I am not sure if part of the sleep issues was the unfamiliarity of having someone hold him and be so attentive to him while he was trying to go to sleep or not. It makes sense given the orphanages don't rock the babies to sleep or just carry them around until they fall asleep. No, they are put down at the requisite sleep time and have to learn to settle themselves. The caretakers wouldn't let anyone scream endlessly that we heard but they didn't have the time or the numbers to really settle the babies down individually.

The schedule at the baby house was/is as follows:
6:00  Wake, change babies, bottle of kefir
Back to sleep
9:00 Bathe, change diaper
9:30 Breakfast consisting of bottle, cereal with boiled egg, juice/tea
11:00 Nap
1:00 Lunch consisting of cereal, mashed potato, cottage cheese.  All food pureed or ground.
2:00 Nap
4:00  Wake
4:30 Snack consisting of formula, pureed fruit, baby food from jar
7:00 Dinner consisting of any cereal, porridge, or formula
8:00 Bath
9-9:30 Bed
12:00am Formula with cereal

So, you will notice that the most sleep he got when he was very young was six hours. I think the babies usually settled down pretty quickly because they were exhausted!

Of course, things have evolved as H grows older. H began screaming less and less. I began staying shorter and shorter periods of time in his room. Now, our bedtime routine rarely consists of screaming any more. In fact, he has taken to chanting: "eat supper, take a bath, go to bed!"On the flip side, he has ALSO developed other methods of staying awake. He will SQUIRM! He rolls his whole body around on his bed until eventually he's so tired it becomes a hand or a foot that's moving. If you are in the room it's a constant prattle of oddball questions or statements (such as his litany of "I like....") He also has a new tactic that usually entails being unable to locate some object du jour that he has decided to sleep with that night. He will drop it when he lays down and comes to the gate telling me he can't see it. The alternative is he will fall asleep, lose his grip, and wake up enough to realize it's no longer in his hand then come to the gate crying about (fill in the blank.anything ranging from a stuffed animal to a toy car to shoes to .....) Lately with our new friend "Boy" H is constantly pulling Boy's pants down around his ankles which causes H to get upset because he can't pull them back up so we get the gate routine.

After we moved south, H decided he didn't want to sleep in his crib. AHA! I took off the side and it became a toddler bed - all set. Ummm...well, not so much. H refuses to sleep in his physical bed. We tried putting on cute sheets Snoopy sheets with all kinds of balls, laying next to him, cajoling, bribing, putting the mattress on the floor, a different toddler bed. Finally we just accepted the fact that he prefers to sleep on the floor. I have a small special blanket I use that I can easily wash for his "bed." The irony is he loves to play on his real bed - just not sleep in it. Honestly, with all the stuff he sleeps with it's probably better  he doesn't sleep in it or we'd hear him telling us something fell off the bed all night, he can't see it, and start crying. It has also made traveling a little easier this way. We don't have to worry about an extra bed.

The screaming still comes into play during weekend naps and there's just not much to be done about that. He will have to continue to outgrow this. We've never been told that he has trouble sleeping at daycare during naptime so I'm sure it's just because he's home with us.

The long discourse on H's sleeping evolution all comes down to last night. It's hard to imagine what goes on in a 2GO3 mind. Last night H woke up crying after a nightmare. This is a rare occurrence but it is distinctly the second time that he's woken up from a nightmare about a "bite." The first middle of the night occurrence was a spider bite. I REALLY thought a live spider had bitten him he was screaming so intensely. H does have a fascination with things biting him....gotta be a boy thing?

Anyway, he woke up screaming - a normal decibel middle of the night scream - and I quickly deduced he had had a nightmare and was able to confirm this as well although I never did figure out what exactly he dreamed had bitten him. He asked me to lay down with him so I did until he settled in. A good 15-20 minutes of flopping around and I told him I was going back to bed. Well, he woke up a couple of more times before finally crashing into his usual "dead-to-the-world" sleep. I anticipated a rough, crying, whining, tired morning.

However, right on schedule (much to my chagrin as I would have like to have slept in a bit)

"Mommy!" (whimper whimper) "I wake up!" (whine whine)

"Ok H, you can wake up." (groggy groggy)

A brief pause....

"Mommy!" (Cheerful and happy???)

"What Santa Claus do?"