Theo has almost stopped waking up in the middle of the night.
He has "slept through" the night for awhile now, in the sense that we no longer have to get up to feed him. And he never really wakes up and bawls for us.
But what he still does, two or three nights a week, is talk in his sleep. He'll wake partly up (and we know he's not fully awake, because when he is, he pulls up in his crib and lets us know it!) and start grumbling like a Harley. Uhh-uh-uhhhhhn-uhn-nuuhhhhhh-uh. NNNNNuhhhh-nnnuh-nnnnnnnnnnnuhn-nunnnn-nuhhhhhn.
When this happens, we either lie in bed and suffer through it--it can last up to forty-five minutes--or we get up and rearrange his blankets or something and tell him to go to sleep.
Now, if you'll remember, we've had to take an incremental approach to him in the first place because he was completely unable, when he was first born, to fall asleep and stay asleep. Didn't matter if we rocked him, sang to him, held him, kept him in bed with us, put him in the cradle, ignored him, whatever. So we had to step down from the whole nine yards--rocking, singing, nursing--to everything-but-nursing, to everything-but-picking-him-up, and so on, until we finally got to the point where if he woke up, all we had to do was rearrange the blanket, tucking one of his favorite corners into his hand, and he'd conk right back out.
But we're sort of stuck there, now. He doesn't do it every night, but when he does it, we usually end up deciding that we'd rather get back to sleep in forty-five seconds than forty-five minutes. And we get up and do the blanket thing.
Last night, though, I was too tired and groggy to think straight, so as soon as he started his engine noises, I just emitted the loudest "Shh!!" ever to pass through my teeth. (I seriously was not thinking.)
And there was silence. It. Worked.
I started laughing so hard I woke myself up good and proper.
Good thing he's cute, eh?
Comments (1)
Oh he is very cute. God totally figured that one out. Romy likes to do raspberries at night. Or she'll scrach her fingernails along her bumper which is slightly ribbed. It took us a while to figure out what the heck that noise was!
Anyway, I'm glad you figured out something that works. Sometimes you just have to fall back on the classics!