Sleep Battles

Andrew was born five weeks early, weighing four and a half pounds, only 17 inches long, and sound asleep. He wasn't ready to be born. My body kind of forced him out. His first few meals were with a feeding tube, but we soon discovered that he did have the sucking reflex. The problem? He couldn't stay awake to finish an ounce of formula/breast milk. For the first three weeks of his life we poured almost all of our energy into getting him to eat. Three weeks. 21 days. That's not that much time. Right? Hahahahahaha! It was an eternity in my book. We tracked every ounce. Every two hours, around the clock, we would start a feeding. It would take an hour to get an ounce (if that) down him. We would move his jaw to help him suck. We'd tickle his tiny feet to try to alert him. All newborns sleep. Most will also eat. But as I've already said, he wasn't ready to be here. After he was fed, I'd take an hour break to pump (I quit at three weeks . . . don't judge or do judge . . . I don't care . . . survival was the word of the day). If I was lucky I'd get to eat or maybe sleep, and we'd start All. Over. Again. It was without a doubt the most terrifying and emotionally and physically exhausting period of my life. We had to make sure this child ate and gained weight, or we'd end up back in the hospital. We had to take him for weigh ins regularly, and the doctors monitored him very closely. Through it all, he slept. (My admiration for parents of micro preemies is huge. I am in awe of those of you who spend months, and sometimes years, fighting battles brought on by prematurity. Three weeks was hard. I cannot imagine how exhausting three months, three years, and beyond must be.)

At three weeks old, Andrew woke up.

And he's been fighting sleep ever since.

It took months to get him into a wake/sleep pattern that made any sense. For an entire year he got up every night for at least one feeding. And even if I believed in letting him cry it out, which I didn't and I don't, I couldn't because he was so small and needed to eat.

Fast forward to 18 months. He was sleeping fairly well. Taking a nap everyday (hallelujah!). And I thought we were through the worst of the sleep battles. Then he decided that it would be fun to get up every night between the hours of 2:00 and 4:00 a.m. and run like a banshee through the house. Not funny.

We tried everything we could to stop this. Nothing worked. I've never been a fan of co-sleeping except on a rare occasion, and I wasn't about to start at 18 months. One night, out of sheer desperation, I looked at my hysterically laughing child and said, "I don't care what you do. I don't care if you run around your room for the rest of the night. I don't care if you sing, talk, or play. I'm not doing this. You will stay in your room. And I shut the door and went and laid down on the couch." Prompt colossal fit of the year, that thankfully only lasted 10 minutes, before he fell asleep on the floor.

For the most part, our sleep battles got slightly better as Andrew got older. But he's never gotten on board with the whole idea of sleeping. He stopped napping at three because if he napped for any substantial amount of time he wouldn't go to sleep at night. It's not that he needs less sleep or that he's hyperactive. It's that he hates to sleep. Every night he tries to negotiate to stay up later. It doesn't work, but I admire his persistence. He thinks he'll miss something important or exciting if he's sleeping, and much like me (I'm not a huge fan of sleep myself, but it has grown on me as I've aged ;)), he needs to unwind in order to fall asleep.

The solution: books. It started with picture books a few years ago. He would ask to look at one after we tucked him in, and I decided to let him. Many nights, I would walk in to find him asleep with the book open. Sometimes the book would be on his face. I've often wondered why he's this way, and the other night, when I fell asleep while reading and dropped my Kindle on my face, I realized it just might be an inherited trait.

I hope and pray that our next child likes to sleep. But I also know that adopted children sometimes struggle with sleep. And that's okay too. I have no plans to isolate her if she struggles to sleep. What we will do will be determined as we go along. Until then, I'm going to sleep as much as possible in preparation for however much sleep I might lose in the future. :)