It’s been a little while since I wrote anything. Truthfully, I’ve just been too tired lately. Spencer, for whatever reason, is going through yet another phase of wanting to be up for 2-3 hours in the middle of the night. I’m kind of done blaming it on teething, and I feel like he’s been constantly teething since he turned 12 months. Is this the dreaded 18 month sleep regression? Yea, could be. Whatever it is, it has me completely zapped.
We do have a bedtime routine, and we try to put him down around the same time every night. He sleeps great in his crib for about 5-6 hours, and then he wakes up yelling “momma, momma.” I’ve tried ignoring him to see if he’ll go back to sleep and he just gets louder until he’s crying. Sometimes he will go back to sleep if I nurse him, and I’m so out of it that I usually just fall asleep in his room while I’m holding him. The past week or so though, he’s woken up wanting to eat snacks, read books, watch Barney, etc.
So, we do. Every night has been the same. I can literally barely keep my eyes open, and inside I’m groaning as I hear him start to chatter and then scoot off my lap to run down the hall. He waits impatiently at the top of the stairs for me to carry him down, and then runs to the TV yelling “Bardie, Bardie!” and also “cracker, cracker.” So I turn on Barney, change his diaper, give him a bottle of milk and a handful of crackers, and halfway pass out on the couch while he watches his show. Around 4/4:30 AM, he will finally start to show signs of being tired again, and he will start grabbing at me saying “baboo,” which means he wants to nurse. It usually doesn’t take too long for him to nurse back to sleep, and then I lay him on the couch next to me because I’m too physically exhausted to carry him back up to his crib.
Losing so much sleep and rarely ever getting to sleep in my own bed has been the hardest part for me, hands down, about having a baby. It has made me question if I can ever handle having another baby. It has made me wonder if I did something wrong by choosing to breastfeed. It has made my body physically hurt almost every day, and has depleted me of energy. It has tempted me to lose my patience with my son when he’s laughing and throwing his toys at me at 2:30 in the morning.
In the middle of the night, when I’m so exhausted I can barely keep my eyes open, it’s so, so easy to be irritated. And when I’m irritated, I have a very difficult time hiding it. I love my son more than anything in this world, but when he’s refusing to let me sleep more than 2-3 hours at a time… for almost 2 years straight now… it almost makes me resent him. And I hate that feeling. I hate feeling negatively towards him in any way.
He’s just a baby and he really doesn’t know any better. All he knows is that he’s having trouble sleeping and he wants to spend time with his mommy, doing the things he likes to do downstairs. As much as I want to be irritated and yell at him to just go to sleep, I want even more for him to feel loved and secure. It takes every ounce of my patience to show him that sometimes. So I try to keep things in perspective and remember that one day soon he will stop crying out for his momma at night, and he will sleep great in his own bed.
One day soon, he won’t want to nurse or cuddle anymore in the middle of the night. When that day comes, I will gladly stretch out in my comfy bed under my beloved heated blanket, but I will also grieve a little. This right now feels like the last days of him truly being a baby. This feels like the end of infancy. And while part of me is celebrating that, another part of me is heartbroken and wishing I could go back in time to just appreciate my baby again. So as much as I am wishing for sleep right now, I need to keep reminding myself that these days are numbered. My days of him clinging to me while he falls asleep, and ruffling his soft hair, and picking him up out of the crib while he’s bouncing on the rails in his footie pajamas… they’ll be over very soon. I have a hard time believing that I’ll ever regret these late, long nights spent with him.
Kristen Stewart, Writer 