CIO Showdown

I'm up at 2am to write this post because Ben is screaming.  He has been crying on and off since 11:30pm.  I figure since I can't sleep while my baby screams anyway and I'm too tired to do anything more productive, I might as well write down my frustrations here.

In my time as a parent, I haven't really subscribed to any "methods."  I'm not really one to read parenting books.  I've just followed my intuition and tried to stay consistent to make it easy for my kids to pick up on patterns in how I respond to what they do.  I'm not saying I have such great mothering instincts that I don't need anyone else's advice, just that so far my kids have been nice enough not to do anything major that I'm at a loss for how to handle.

So it's not that I'm a particular fan of the "cry-it-out" method for getting babies of a certain age to sleep at night.  I think it's important to give them comfort if they need it.  But in certain situations, I feel justified in trying to let a baby put him or herself to sleep.  It's bad for me if my kids think that whenever they wake up, someone needs to rock them back to sleep.  My "rule" is basically that if you're well-fed and burped and have a clean diaper, I will rock you to sleep twice (or ask John to do it one of those times).  If you fall asleep easily once I've picked you up but you start crying again soon after I put you back down, I have to infer that nothing is seriously wrong and your main problem is not being held.  And after I've already rocked you to sleep once or twice, I don't really have the patience to keep that up indefinitely, and certainly not when I should be sleeping.  Of course, a newborn baby is not going to get this.  I don't know what the magic age is -- that's where the intuition comes in, and mine tells me that Ben is plenty old enough to pick up on cause and effect.

The problem with Ben is how persistent he is.  When I hear other parents talk about reluctantly letting their kids cry it out at night, the story is usually that they decide beforehand to give the kid 15 minutes to fall asleep.  The kid falls asleep in 15 minutes or less.  So maybe it's just that the moms who let their kids cry for longer than that aren't telling others about it because they're ashamed, but I never hear anyone say they do that.  When Ben is really worked up, he'll cry for an hour or more.  I just can't believe how long he lasts.  Here is tonight's story: tonight he wakes up at 11:30pm to nurse -- earlier than I'd like, but fine.  He nurses for plenty of time, and I put him down with no problem when he's done.  I think everything's good, but about 15 minutes later he starts crying.  I wait about a minute, then go in and rock him back to sleep, making sure to give him a chance to burp in case that's the problem.  Once again, he goes down easily.  Then about 10 minutes later, crying again.  This time John goes in, rocks him to sleep, puts him down quiet.  Then... crying again.  OK, now we leave him on his own: he's not crying like he's hurt (just mad), I can't think of anything that could be wrong, and we've comforted him twice.  It's 1:30am.  Well, like I said, I started typing this post after 2am.  I think he finally quit around 2:15.

I do feel really bad letting him cry that long, and I don't know how Sophie can sleep through it.  But I also just can't bring myself to reward that behavior.  So we see who breaks first.  It seems really messed up to be playing chicken with a 6-month-old baby.  My decision in this case isn't something I'm proud of.  But I still think it was the right one.  Sigh...