One of the questions that we had for the doctor was whether Abby is getting old enough to establish routines and habits, which of course she is. Dr. E told me that I had already established some habits in how I get Abby to sleep that would have to be broken.
The idea is that you should not rock the baby to sleep; rather, you should rock the baby to drowsiness, put her into the crib and let her go to sleep on her own. This has never been a problem when we put her down for the night because she is almost always so drowsy that she doesn't wake up when we actually put her into the crib. But it is an issue during daytime naps. You can rock her to sleep, but actually putting her down wakes her up. She starts to play in the crib and quickly gets revved back up again. And as I've discussed previously, if she doesn't get her naps when she needs them, she gets very fussy.
So yesterday, I decided that I would, as per the doctor's orders and according to the doctor's instructions, let Abby "cry it out" when I put her down for her afternoon nap. You put her down. If she cries, you visit her at 5 minutes, just putting your hand on her chest and saying quietly that you love her and that it is time to sleep. If she's still crying, you return and do the same thing after 10 more minutes, then fifteen more minutes, and then 20 more minutes, etc.
Well, I visited at 12:35, 12:40, 12:50, 1:05, and 1:20. If you are sharp, you realized that this last time was not 20 minutes after the previous one. And that's because I couldn't do it! I couldn't wait. I cracked. In my defense, she had worked her way over to the corner of the crib and I was worried that she might have gotten her arm hung up between the mattress and the wooden slats. Yea, that's what I was worried about.
Abby made sounds that I have never heard her make before. She would take a couple of deep breaths and then let fly with what were obviously expletives. Long, colorful, imaginative, and, I'm sure, deeply offensive streams of expletives. She would scream to the point of coughing, recover, and scream again to the point of coughing. Towards the end, when I would visit her. I would roll her over onto her back, talk quietly to her and put her passy back into her mouth. And she wouldn't even open her eyes. She just kept screaming as if I wasn't even there.
It was quite a journey for dear old Dad, a very long fifty-five minutes. It's not just the noise and the instinct-triggering sound of your baby crying. I was imagining all kinds of wierd things. I kept imagining police coming to the door because of reports that I was abusing my child. It was genuinely awful.
So, how did it end?
Well, the last time I went to visit her, I essentially gave in. Hey, fifty-minutes is not too shabby, and I challenge any of you to make it that long. I visited her five minutes early, rolled her on her back, told her that I loved her and that it was time to sleep and put the passy in her mouth. She opened her eyes to look up at me. And then conked out into a deep, deep sleep, which lasted for two hours. It was one of the best naps she's ever had.
The tie goes to Daddy.
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