Sleep Training

Right now? It is one am.

I am typing this post into Word so I can proofread and post it tomorrow after I have (hopefully!!) had a few hours of sleep and consequently have stopped hallucinating.
All that money I wasted on drugs in my youth, when all I really needed was a six month old to keep me in a state of chronic sleep deprivation.

Anyone else been there? We are sleep training. You can’t tell, but my fingers are dripping with sarcasm as I type the word sleep. Because sleep training has nothing to do with sleep, as far as I can tell, and everything to do with excruciating mental torture. It’s about as much fun as it sounds.

For those of you who are blissfully ignorant, sleep training involves taking an infant who is accustomed to sleeping with his parents and attempting to teach him to sleep in his own bed. By himself. You do this by putting him in his crib while he is “drowsy but awake”, giving him a reassuring pat on the head, and leaving the room. Then you wait for the mouth of Hades to open up on the spot and swallow you, because that is what happens next. There is no feeling on earth like listening to your child scream for you.

Of course, both parents are not affected by this the same way. Most men seem to have some sort of switch in their brains that allows them to “turn off” the screaming and sleep right through it. Most women, on the other hand, have the switch in their brains that takes the sound of their child crying and turns it into a uncontrollable urge to rip the skin off their faces and stuff it into their ears. I understand that biologically, this makes sense. He has to be able to get up tomorrow and provide for the family, while me? I can slap a Sesame Street video on repeat, make sure the knives and matches are all out of the toddler’s reach, and call it a day. So it’s a good thing that right now Mr. Monkeysparkets is snoozing like a non-sleep-training baby. God bless his twisted black little heart.

Just kidding! Love you, honey!

Actually, the fact that my hubby is willing to go through this whole thing with me makes him, according to my survey, better than 88% of all husbands out there. And he is astoundingly patient with my cranky, hallucinating, sleep-deprived ass. So seriously, God bless him. And as much as I complain, I do believe that for us, this is a necessary process. A little bump on the road to a well-rested family. We did this with our two year old, and after about two horrific weeks she began sleeping through the night like an angel.

I’m not going to get into defending the practice of sleep training here. If you are an attachment parenting zealot, you’ve already decided that I am going to parenting hell and nothing I can say will change your mind. If you’ve been where I am, you are just nodding sympathetically and saying, “Girl, just stick with it. It’ll all come out in the wash.”

Or something like that.