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I read an article a while back about how photo apps with filters are influencing how we remember our memories. I don't actually think that is a bad thing. The filter I used on this photo is the way I remember this moment. It was a long day. I felt a little gritty from exhaustion. And I looked across the room at this scene, my heart went "ka-thunk" with a big jolt of happiness. Softly out of focus is exactly right.
Doesn't she look sweet when she's sleeping?
She hasn't been looking like that much recently. More like a squirmy, whiney, wide-awake and exhausted toddler.
We have been weathering the dreaded 18-month sleep regression.
"Sleep regression" is the term generally applied when your normally well-rested baby suddenly refuses to nap, fights bedtime, regularly wakes up too early, or wakes up repeatedly all night for no apparent reason. The experts say they come at expected intervals - 4 months, 9 months, 13 months, 18 months and 24 months (give or take a month) - and last between 2-6 weeks.
Bean's 18-month regression hit early, right around 16 months. Which also happened to be when she started walking in earnest.
Naps were still mostly OK, but she started fighting me at bedtime. Wanting to nurse but squirming constantly, wanting to play and just taking forever to fall asleep. Some nights it was a two or three hour ordeal. Then she'd wake at midnight, at 3, at 5, at 6. We were both wiped out every day and I just coudn't seem to pull out of the downward spiral that is an overtired baby. And then my own exhaustion hit me like a brick wall.
That was about three weeks ago. I went into survival mode for a while but now that we have had a couple of nights of improved sleep I wanted to offer up what worked to get us through. If nothing else, so I can come back and read this post when she's in the next regression!
Do Whatever Works
I have a friend whose newborn only slept 20 minutes at at time for many months. She tried lots of things to change his sleep patterns, but eventually she just went with it and did whatever she could to keep him and herself as rested as possible. Eventually, thankfully, he grew out of it.
I think of her on our worst days, when none of the things that worked to soothe Bean last week are working at all. Think outside of your normal repoirtoire and pull in techniques for drastic situations. Here are some of the things that worked for us:
Protect Your Own Rest
I got into a really bad cycle of staying up too late on nights bedtime took extra long because I was so desperate for "adult time." Early morning waking and crying spells after those late nights were pure torture. I had to institute a strict bedtime for myself, even if it meant I was leaving my to-do list unfinished.
I also gave myself permission to do no housework during her nap. If she napped in the car I read a book. If she napped at home I got myself a cold drink and caught up on Facebook or blogs. We ran out of clean underwear a couple of times, but it kept me mostly sane.
Make sure to keep up on your exercise, your vitamins and eating a balanced diet. I slipped on all three of these and ended up sick in addtion to exhausted.
Don't throw in the towel
It is easy to let the routines go when you are just trying to keep it together every day. But I routines are important, even if you can't completely maintain them. I tried to keep naptime at about the same time every day, make dinner at the same time every night, and then move into the regular bedtime routine.
Just be willing adjust if that particular day the routine is not going to cut it. If she was too tired to manage her regular dinner I'd offer a yogurt squeeze pouch instead. Nap boycott today? Into the car we go. But tomorrow we will be back in the rocking chair at noon to try again.
Don't Doubt Yourself
At the beginning of this regression I tried really hard to figure out what was wrong so I could fix it. Was she teething? Was the room too light? Was she hungry? Did she need more activity during the day? Less? What did she need that I wasn't giving her?
It took a handful of days to realize this was just going to have to be endured. I wasn't doing anything wrong. But until then I gave myself a lot of grief about what a bad mom I was.
Don't do that. You're doing great. This is normal. It sucks, but it is normal.
Remember This Too Shall Pass
The biggest lesson I have learned about raising a child thus far it that everything changes.
That really cute way she would get so excited that she'd shake before a bath? She doesn't do it any more. That annoying way she'd try to bite me when she was frustrated? Doesn't do it any more.
Sleep regressions are like that, too. Hang in there. It will end. The baby will sleep again soon, and so will you.
I promise.
free·dom /ˈfrēdəm/
noun1. The state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint: He won his freedom after a retrial.
2. Exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc.
3. The power to determine action without restraint.
photo by QXZ via Creative Commons
Along with the major milestone of learning to walk comes a sleep regression – a fact well known to parents of new toddlers. Child development experts say this is due to the mental buzz when a child is on the cusp of a major new skill. There is so much new information to process every night that it interrupts the child’s sleep.
Even when we are grown up, standing on the threshold of life’s milestones can be disturbing. New skills bring us new freedom, but also unknown vistas. Next to the mental effort of processing the change usually sits fear. Fear of failing, of course. But also fear of not being able to find or adjust to new boundaries. Fear of how others will respond. Fear of not knowing what the new thing will be like. Fear of stepping off the edge and trusting yourself to learn to fly.
When I was at my acupuncturist’s office last month, she said she felt stress in my pulse and it took me a minute to dredge up what was weighing on my unconscious mind. It is this: I am at the cusp of making changes in my life that will afford me freedom that I never imagined possible. And though there are really no down sides, the act of committing to the change is making me very uncomfortable.
My Bean is a walker now. She had been taking the occasional step or two for a few months, but one evening, while we sat in the meadow at Strawberry Music Festival in between acts, she simply began. She walked back and forth between her father and I, over and over, falling into our arms. She screeched with joy. She fell and picked herself up. She bounced with excitement.
When we returned home again, she tested out her new skills. Walking barefoot on carpet is different than walking with shoes in the yard. She practiced and improved, and grinned and laughed. She fell, but she picked herself up. Walking up steps is different than walking down. She pointed and showed me what she could do. She took my hand when she needed help, but mostly she just tried over and over again. She slept badly for a couple of weeks while her brain worked out the details each night, but each day she tackled again what was hard the day before and each day it got easier.
I associate the idea of freedom with ease, but in reality there is work to get over the threshold to a freer place. Sometimes the work is painful and scary. Sometimes the path is rending.
But we cannot allow ourselves to stand in the place of fear where we imagine every possible thing that could go wrong. If we do, we will never take that first step, never cross the threshold, and never walk out the other side.
Watching the joy with which my daughter explores the world from her new vertical perspective is intoxicating. She inspires me to gather my courage to let go of my old and take my own wobbly steps into freedom.
My attention is so fragmented right now. My Bean finally learned to walk last month, and while she is not yet running, she is climbing. On the couch, on the coffee table, on anything that will help her get to anything higher, and on the dining room chairs if we leave them pulled out.
We had fallen into a nice groove, she and I, where I could tell what she was doing in another room by the sounds I could hear. That allowed me to sit at the dining room table and she could just range around the house without my direct intervention. But now no room is safe unless I'm in it. And I'm not even totally confident of that.
My writing time has been scarce. My pre-writing planning that usually happens outside of my childcare hours while I'm just doing my day-to-day stuff has been wiped out by the necessity of being totally hands on with this toddler while she learns the ins and outs of gravity from a new perspective. I'm trying to capture fragments of thoughts as they flit by and my notebooks are getting filled with random notes and scrawled messages that I may or may not be able to decipher later.
A month or so ago I read some summer exercises for writers at SheWrites. It included the suggestion to utilize lists. One example was to make a list of fears to overcome.
Since it seems that all I'm writing right now are lists, I started thinking about how to turn that into an exercise instead of an annoyance. What kinds of lists would be interesting to create. Here are a few I thought of:
What lists do you keep? What lists would you like to keep?
