To sleep, perchance to dream...

After going through a rough spot - sleep-wise - with Lyric last month because of her teeth coming in, now she sleeps like a baby. Figuratively. Literally, sleeping like a baby means sleeping for a couple hours and waking up in a continuous cycle so that your parents are exhausted and ready to throw themselves down the porch stairs in a demented sleep deprivation rage. So to sum up, she's been sleeping very well.

As you probably know, I've been co-sleeping, and when I say "I," I mean just me and Lyric, in the bed. Ryan is on the futon in the other room. And you know that I've been concerned about our sleeping situation, but only because I've been preached to by many MANY people, from my mother, to Ryan's grandfather, to a friend of mine who DOESN'T EVEN HAVE KIDS, who tell me over and over again how much I'm going to regret sharing my bed with my baby, how she's never going to sleep on her own, how she's going to be sleeping with me until she goes to college, and how I'm never going to have sex with my husband in our bed at night again.

To those people I say SUCK IT.

Because Lyric is sleeping just fine, all by herself, in her co-sleeper. I'm trying to train her to fall asleep on her own, so I nurse her almost to sleep, then put her down on her belly. She'll look around for a while, sometimes she'll cry, but after about 15 minutes she'll usually fall asleep. If, on the off chance she doesn't fall asleep after 15 minutes, I'll lie down in bed with her and continue to nurse her until she calms down and drifts off, then she's in the co-sleeper.

And that means I have the bed to myself until about 5:00, when she normally wakes up, because that's when Ryan gets up, and when he gets up it sounds like a herd of rabid elephants are invading the house, so I wake up, and Lyric wakes up, and that's when I bring her in bed with me, where we'll usually both sleep until 9, some times later. We've been known to sleep on occasion until 11. Jealous?

I love the fact that my baby loves to sleep as much as I do.

EXCEPT.

Lately, probably due to stress, I haven't been sleeping very well. For all the wonderful room I have in bed all by myself, it takes me AGES to fall asleep. And once I'm asleep, I have, on most nights, totally weird and sometimes scary dreams. Some of them are very vivid and terrifying, and I usually wake up terrified. That happens probably once a week. I'm not sure what to do about it. The dreams don't bother me so much as the falling asleep part, because I HATE lying in bed awake. I don't think there's much I can do. Normally I'd take some Tylenol PM, but as a nursing mom, I'd hate to take something that's going to make me less than alert if I have to wake up suddenly.

So it's poetic justice I suppose, now that my baby is sleeping, I'm not. Any ideas?

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