Sleep, glorious sleep!

I started this post a while back. I guess I should post it.

As a vegan mother I knew I would have to breast feed my child for quite some time. Before Milo was born, I was worried how everything would pan out (would it hurt? would I hate it? would it wear me out?) Of course, once I was pregnant I learned about a zillion more reason why breast is best. These reasons helped me make it through all the nursings and pumpings.

Over the last year though I got into a bad habit of nursing my son to sleep at night. When you are tired and you still have a ton of things to do (shower, dry hair, straighten hair, make lunch, grade papers, stuff diapers, wash bottles, pump, lesson plans, oh and sleep) it is just the easier option. Well Milo decided to wean himself a week or so after his birthday. This was sad and exciting at the same time.

Unfortunately, one bad habit led to another. Instead of nursing him to sleep, Tony or I would rock him to sleep. Basically, this meant he needed us to fall asleep. This meant if he woke up during the night we were back to square one... time for more rocking. What a vicious cycle. By the time November rolled around, Milo was regressing. He was waking up once or more during the night and Tony and I were exhausted. Finally, over Thanksgiving break we decided we would try sleep training. We tried this when he was about 6 months and it was brutal. The cries were just awful. Some co-workers swore by it though, so we decided to try it again. We knew it might take longer since Milo was 14 months old. We tried it out on a Friday night and it was AMAZING. Milo woke up once. We changed him and put him back in his crib, told him we loved him and left the room. After 5 minutes Tony went in to calm him down/reassure him we didn't abandon him. He was in the room for about a minute. Milo was still upset (but it was nearly as bad as I thought it would be). It was my turn to go in after 10 more minutes, but after about 8 minutes there was silence. I was shocked. Was he really asleep or just resting in between cries? He was asleep. Tony and I were quite amazed and wondered why we hadn't tried this sooner (9 months? a year?).

Since then Milo has been a sleeping champion. During the week he sleeps from 8 pm to 6:30 am and on the weekend he usually sleeps from 8:30 - 8 am. We are loving it!

Moral of this post? Boob is good. Habits are hard to break. Sleep is important for everyone.