The Sleep Ninja
I am the mother of a 10-month old today (and I am still in awe that I am a Mami and still cry every once in a while out of sheer joy that I have her). My frog princess is a happy baby. Generally, sleeps well. When she woke in the middle of the night it was to nurse and then right back to sleep she went. A couple of weeks after I started work I realized that I couldn’t keep her up past 7:30 p.m. Ever since then we start our routine between 7 and 7:30. Nursing, reading, praying, lullaby. The nursing and the reading sometimes change places depending on her eating schedule but this has been our routine since she was 2 and a half months old! As the months have passed, she’d sleep later and later usually waking up in the 5 o’clock hour to nurse and maybe dozing off and giving her Mami a few more minutes of sleep before starting her day.
About a month ago, my sleepy sleepy frog princess was replaced by a ninja who did not need sleep. A ninja who wanted to play and fight me (literally) if I tried to put her to bed. When she does fall asleep, she will snap to attention when I go to put her down in the crib and sits up and starts crying. I am not sure what happened. I keep going through my mind to see if anything changed in her routine. She is a power napper in the daytime though every once in a while she’ll go 1-1.5 hours at a time. I cannot figure out what has changed! To top everything off, I never really did sleep training because she never really needed it. And now we have added the bad habit of co-sleeping out of necessity for our own sleep sanity so I’m thinking it’s going to be even harder to get her back in a routine.
Needless to say I now must go read the books I purchased that have been collecting dust and the website I found that provides information I never thought I’d need.
But last night, the ninja took a break. I went to put the frog princess down a little later than usual (8 p.m.) after sitting down to dinner. We read (Daddy Kisses), nursed and while nursing she started dozing. I prayed our prayers and whispered a lullaby. I kissed her soft, plump cheek, whispered I loved her, set her down and…nothing. She woke up at 12:42 a.m. to nurse and fell promptly asleep. I kissed that cheek again, set her down and she slept until 7 a.m. Thank you Jesus! I am praying for a repeat performance tonight and the beginning of a new routine starting a little later, perhaps.
It also helped that I was in bed by 10:05 and so managed to get some rest (took a break from getting this site up and working in the background to make it fabulous). I sure hope I don’t see the sleep ninja again but I will get myself ready with information just in case she comes back so that I’ll know what to do (other than sit on the bed with her and cry at the feeling of being a complete failure as a mom).
Yes, we all have those moments. We don’t talk about them but, we do. Perhaps if we spoke the words out loud more often, we wouldn’t feel so bad when we felt this way because we’d know it’s normal. But, that’s another topic, for another blog.