Bedtime

As my child passes from cute little baby to wretched squirmy toddler, I've noticed that she gets away with a few things that I always said I would NEVER let my child get away with.

I've never been into the Ferber method; if my kid is crying, I'm going to pick her up. I think that I've been rewarded for doing so, since she only cries when something is wrong. However, as she gets older, HER idea of something wrong vs. MY idea of something wrong is beginning to differ.

And so begins the new nighttime battle. She used to lay calmly on my chest at 8:00pm, quietly sucking on her binkie until she passed happily into a peaceful sleep. She would sleep soundly throughout the evening until 6:00am, when I would bring her down and place her in the bed with me & my husband.

Now, she doesn't want to go to sleep at 8:00. She'll throw her binkie in a fit of rage and lean against the coffee table screaming, waving her little arms when you try to pick her up. So I let her play until she finally collapses from exhaustion in the middle of the living room floor. But the other night, she showed no signs of fatigue, and my husband had had enough.

"Say goodnight to Mommy," he said, lifting her up and preparing to take her to bed. I immediately disagreed.
"You can't just put her up there in the dark. She's not used to that."
My husband gave me a look I'd never seen before. It was something akin to... frustration. "Fine, I'm going to bed. You get her to go to sleep."

I put on my Good Mommy hat and lifted my child up to my chest, where she immediately began the squirmy toddler routine. How is it that 20 pounds can hurt so damn much? I put her back down on the floor and looked longingly to the bedroom door. Perhaps if I brought her to lay down in the dark room, she would get the idea. So I brought her our darkened bedroom and lay her on the king size bed.

I'm off track here for a moment, but have you ever noticed that a king-size bed suddenly shrinks when you put a squirmy kid in it? Elbows in your face, little feet in your ribs, and the occasional completely random head-butt. (Those are the absolute worst, because while your own head is processing the pain shooting through it, you get the added bonus of a shrieking child to compliment the pain. A feast for your eyes and ears!)

So anyway, after the third head butt, I made an executive decision and lugged the little one to her own bed. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, walking away from that look of betrayal in her eyes. And as I heard her inhale to prepare for the mother of all wailings, I shut the door. Back down in my bedroom, I lay in my bed with the heaviest guilt I ever experienced. I heard her indignant cries coming through the baby monitor....

....for all of two minutes. TWO minutes. And then she went to sleep. Out cold. Gone. I almost wanted to go upstairs and shake her back awake. All that guilt for THIS??? And my mother's voice echoed in my head somewhere...

"Sometimes you have to just let them cry."

Indeed. Lesson learned.