I don't know why it has taken me 17 months to fully embrace this but today I came to terms and finally accepted the fact that my daughter is just not a sleeper. She never has been and probably never will be.
In the beginning months I floundered big time as I struggled to make the Babywise sleep-eat-play routine work for her. It never did. I was thrown into a tizzy of stress and uncertainty about what she "should" be doing. The 1.5-2 hour naps that my child "should" be taking were ending shortly after 30-40 minutes and I thought it was because I was doing something wrong.
This only propelled me to read more books which in turn stressed me out even more. It exhausts me to even think about those first few months. I think I'm still scarred by it all and am vowing to have a different experience with baby 2.0. I was recently so encouraged by a post by Shawna on Styleberry Blog about her successes and failures with BabyWise. She was a huge advocate of the method- that was until her second child came along. I love this paragraph from the post:
I have decided, that Ezzo (the author of BabyWise) is still brilliant. He makes successful Babywisers believe in themselves. What better tool for a new mama? But he makes failed Babywisers…well…feel like failures. But some of us will LOVE Babywise. We will swear by it. We will recommend it to everyone we know and judge other mothers who cannot get it to work, because he tells us we can control our child’s sleep pattern. But what about the rest of us? What about those of us who are the same parent, if not a MORE skilled parent and cannot get it to work. Then what do we do? There is no eat-wake-sleep pattern if there IS NO SLEEP. Heaven help those first time mamas who just can’t get the Babywise routine to work. Sweet mamas. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT.
Love that. So much. I wish I would have read this post in those hard months.
Anyway, we stumbled through our first year and are half way through our second. Adelyn gradually moved into two naps a day that were about 1.5 hours each. Not bad in my book.
Now on to the present.
Our little lady has always been an early bird- a six-o'clock a.m. early bird. It's not rare for that to drift back to 5:30 sometimes. I can remember ONE time that she slept until 7:30. It was heaven. When daylight savings time hit and we were to "fall back" and hour, it was brutal. We were up at 4:30 a few mornings- 5:30 on the other days for about a week. When I would hear other moms complain and whine about their kids waking up at 7 a.m. instead of 8, I didn't know whether to laugh or scowl.
About a month ago, she transitioned from taking two naps to one. I was told by many people that even though you lose the morning nap, it's really nice in the afternoon to have a longer, 2-3 hour nap where you can get a lot done. I looked forward to this but should have known my daughter would not conform. In fact, instead of taking a longer nap in the afternoon, it got shorter. She wakes up after about an hour and is a total grump. Where is this afternoon leisure I was promised?? Instead, I have found myself working harder to appease a highly temperamental 17 month old. It's exhausting.
I write all this because today was a particularly hard day. She was up at 5:24 a.m. this morning, and took only a one hour nap in the afternoon. While 17 months old is a really fun stage, it is REALLY hard too. I just feel like I don't have a break. Many suggest putting her to bed earlier (before her normal 7 p.m. bedtime) but this seems to only backfire by her getting up earlier. Today, however, I didn't care. She was such a grumpy mess by 6:00 so she was in bed and asleep by 6:15. Tomorrow might be an early morning.
I'm tired. I just wish my 17 month old was too. :)
I'm trying not to overanalyze it all like I did in the first 6 months of her life. I'm trying to just go with the flow, not over think it, and embrace whatever the day hands us.
However, being a pregnant, tired mama, I can't help but hope each day that she transitions into a long afternoon nap. Selfishly because I want one too!I can't help but hope that when I go to bed, I will get to sleep past 6. I think my frustrations are coming because I keep hoping she'll be someone she's not. She's not a sleeper and probably never will be. She's not the kid who will sleep into 8:30 and that I have to wake up for breakfast. She's not the toddler that takes the 3 hour blissful nap in the afternoon. She never has been so I don't know why I grow so frustrated when she's not.
Adelyn is who God made her to be. Who am I to wish for something different simply because it is an inconvenience to me? I want to embrace her for who she is and love her the way she is. I don't want to be a mom who is constantly trying to make their child into something they are not. And honestly, that mentality and pattern probably starts with the small stuff like naps.So today was a hard but good day for me. I accepted she isn't what is ideal for me but accepted that God intimately knit everything about her together in the way he wants it to be. I can't change who that is, nor should I want to.
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