A rambling ode to squishy orange ear plugs

My children have never been good sleepers, and I'm reasonably certain that it's mostly my fault.

Sleep training (ie "ferberizing") didn't work with my daughter.  We tried it on two consecutive nights, and both times, she cried until she threw up.  The second night, I had to leave the house because I just couldn't bear to listen to her cry.  It was awful, and I vowed that there had to be a better way, and refused to even entertain thoughts of trying it with my son.  (If there is an effective way to help your kids learn to sleep through the night over a short period of time, I have yet to hear about it.)

I think now about the tactics I used to get Mischief to sleep and it makes me cringe a little, nauseous.  I was so green at parenting, and didn't realize that it didn't need to be my way or the highway - that there could be a happy medium that didn't involve me putting a sobbing infant Mischief into my sling, zipping her under an enormous hoodie and then walking laps of the apartment until she stopped crying and fell asleep.  That, as a toddler, my job shouldn't have been to make her sleep as much as it should have been to help her learn how to sleep.

So, you win some and you lose some.  I imagine that my shift from too authoritarian (about sleep anyway) to too permissive arose from my guilt over how poorly I mismanaged Mischief's early sleep training, and so for years now, I've been the mom who gets up in the night every time the kids wake, climbing sleepily over the baby gate that closes off their room in the night and attending to every lost lovey, late-night thirst, midnight pee and bad dream.

(That's not to say that we haven't made other attempts at sleep training - before Trouble was born,  I successfully weaned Mischief from being bounced to sleep on an exercise ball, and attempted with less success to teach her to fall asleep without one of us in her bed with her.  We've tried a few times to encourage both kids to go back to sleep on their own after night wakings with mixed results, and have managed to transition our bed back to an adult bed from a family one.)

At 4.5, Mischief sleeps through the night 5 nights out of 7 now, and for that I am profoundly grateful, but Trouble is still up at least once per night, but usually more like 2 - 3 times.  He always wants the same thing.  "Climb into my bed with me, Mommy."  Like a very sleepy chump, I always do.

Last week though, I splurged and bought myself some fluorescent orange squishy ear plugs.  I've had a hard time using them - I've spent so long at the beck and call of the children that I feel guilty for intentionally making myself largely unavailable to them.  I say largely because if Trouble stands at the baby gate and calls for me more than twice, I'll hear it.  The few times I haven't heard it, DH has thrown a sharp elbow into my ribs (in his sleep no less) and I've gone in to settle Trouble back down.

This morning, Trouble woke (for the third time) around 4:30, and I heard it but was just too tired to get up right away.  DH called out and told him to go back to sleep, and after calling for me four or five times and getting no response, he did just that!  He climbed back into his bed and went back to sleep for another couple of hours.  Hope springs eternal.

The amazing thing about the ear plugs is that when I have them in, I sleep more deeply than I have in years.  I drop off to sleep, and don't know anything until I wake.  It's so lovely.  The Dawn Chorus (my avian nemesis!) no longer troubles me as I struggle to eke out just. one. more. hour, and when I stumble back to my room from Trouble's at 3:45, the sound of DH's gentle snores need no longer be cause for despair.

My pregnancy with Mischief went a full two weeks beyond my due date.  It was my first pregnancy, and I had (and still have) strong feelings about the necessity of medical intervention in the birthing process, so it was with a great deal of dismay that I agreed with my midwife to schedule an induction to begin my labour.   We made the decision on a Sunday morning, and planned to go in for the induction on Monday morning.  Within hours of talking with my midwife, my contractions started, and my labour began naturally.  I firmly believe that once I'd made the decision, I was able to relax into it enough to allow my body to do what it needed to do.

I think the same thing is happening with the ear plugs.  Along with my mom's ridiculous cleaning gene, I've also inherited her extraordinary capacity for worry.  I worry like a champ.  I worry like a fish swims and a bird flies.  I'm probably worried about you right now.  I have even (and I wish I were kidding about this) worried about how much I worry.  I spend a lot of my worry energy on my kids, and as much as they're the authors of my bad sleep, I suspect that my constant concern that they might need me has also played a part.  Once I made the decision to put in the ear plugs and trust that they're probably not going to die in their sleep, my body seems to have been able to just do what it needs to, and it's amazing.

And I have hope that it's going to get even better - nobody takes their mom to college to help them sleep, right?