My nights with Levi:

Or How can an hour last so long?

Lots of people have kids. Its necessary for survival of the species, but why, oh why, do they ALL hate sleep?! Well, at least mine do when they’re babies. I can’t understand it either. I love sleep. Sleep is beautiful; sleep is one of my top three things that I enjoy doing (right behind eating). Aren’t children supposed to be like their parents? I can’t imagine that I EVER fought (literally) tooth and nail to stay awake at 1:30 in the morning. It wouldn’t even be that bad if it was just going to sleep that was the problem; oh no, Levi doesn’t like STAYING asleep. It is as if sleep is a personal affront to his character.

Well occasionally I try and get Levi to sleep in the middle of the night so Rachael can sleep. In this long, choreographed dance I literally exert my will over that of my 6 month old baby and force him to sleep. My mantra at night is “I’m bigger than you and more stubborn so you might as well just save yourself the trouble and go to sleep now.” It doesn’t work that way but its pleasant to believe that it might one day. Levi does a good job of humoring me too. Some nights he pretends to go back to sleep after just a few minutes and I feel a wave of relief and think “Gee, maybe, just maybe, tonight I won’t have to do my dance,” but Levi soon shows that he was just trying to boost my ego and he shows me he was never really asleep.

I start off in a straight line with a slow bounce. Then I begin walking in large concentric circles and add a little rock to my arm movement and increase the force of my gait to increase vibrational force. Then I start taking very heavy, very belabored steps and walk in a figure 8 pattern. After this I start rocking my body, simulating the movement a rocking chair while sliding my back foot so as to still keep moving around the living room. I then begin making the slow journey towards the bedroom in this fashion. When I arrive at the glider chair I keep rocking but slowly bend my knees while keeping my upper body erect and flexed. If all works out I will be sitting in the chair in a few minutes and then I have to simply rock back and forth until Levi can pass the knee test. This is a simple test, if I can move him from one leg to the other without him stirring I can safely put him down.

Ugh…I am just creating a worse monster, I know that, but what am I supposed to do? Let a sick kid cry? If I’m on my game (and lucky) this dance can go as quickly as 20 minutes with Levi’s distress declining very rapidly from one stage of the dance to the next. On the bad nights, though, it can take upwards of 40 minutes.

Another strategy I have developed is simply to put him into his car seat after the first stage of the dance and gently rock him. This takes longer but is easier on me since I can sit down while doing it (I can rock the car seat with my foot). The drawback here is that I often will fall asleep while rocking him, and so won’t sufficiently finish the task and he will wake up. I skirt this issue by going on the computer. I find I can rock the car seat with one foot while keeping myself awake on the computer long enough to get Levi to that magical point of being able to stay asleep for a few hours. This tactic has the problem that I don’t have a good test to see if Levi is ready for me to stop rocking him and so often I will stay up longer than needful (being distracted by the computer), and hence miss more precious sleep than needful.

Levi was such a good sleeper too. He was amazing. Then he got sick and couldn’t sleep. His nose would get clogged or he would wake up coughing. Well that went on long enough that it developed into a routine and even though he isn’t sick anymore he still is waking up as if he were. Patience, pressure, consistency, and time. That’s what it takes to solve all problems and this one is no different. Most of my other problems though can be tackled during daylight hours, and that does make a world of difference. You could even say its like night and day.