- Share This Post
- submit
- 6
-
Sparkle (0)
Before I became a parent, I remember listening to a coworker lament about the lack of real estate he was able to command in his own bed. "We have a queen-sized bed," he said, "and even though when we go to sleep at night, it's just my wife and me, by midnight it's my wife, me, our eight-year-old, our five-year-old and two dogs. Half the time I just go into the living room and sleep on the couch."
I could barely control my disdain: seriously, what kind of a weak parent lets his kids run his life -- not to mention ruin a good night's sleep? "Dude, if I ever become a parent, that nonsense is NEVER HAPPENING TO ME," I sniffed. "My kid is staying in her bed all night long. Because I'M THE MOMMY."
Don't you just love it when your words come back to bite you?
In my defense, I didn't allow my daughter Alex to control my precious night sleep because I was too soft-hearted, and couldn't stand to hear my baby hurt. I did it because OH MY GOD CHILD YOU NEED TO BE QUIET BECAUSE I NEED TO SLEEP FINE COME SLEEP IN OUR BED JUST PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, BE QUIET!!!
Of course, I did try to make her spend the night in her own bed. I tried everything: I tried bribing. I tried singing. I even tried "Ferberizing" -- a method of letting your child cry herself to sleep -- and that failed miserably. Even though Alex is generally the most easy-going of children who rarely gets her feathers ruffled, she was freaking tenacious when it came to insisting, most vociferously, that we bring her to our bed. For the first few years of her life I can count the number of times on one hand that I actually was able to have an uninterrupted 8 hours of sleep.
That's right, my friends: it was YEARS before she slept through the night.
YEARS.
Finally, as Alex approached her fourth birthday, my husband Marcus and I decided we had enough. As we got closer to her big day, we kept making a big deal about WHAT A BIG! GIRL! SHE! WAS! GOING! TO! BE! We went on and on about how she was no longer a baby. We bought a new mug for her warm milk (a "grown-up tea mug, like mummy and daddy use"), we bought her new "big girl tennis shoes" (ordinary $10 sneaks, but different than any she'd ever worn before). I even did her hair in a different way -- Big Girl Hair, obv.
And then one morning, the day before her birthday, as I was combing her hair, I casually broke the news to her.
"Alex," I said, "Do you know what else happens when a girl turns 4?"
"What?" she asked, innocently enough.
"Well," I said, quite importantly, "When you turn four, it is imperative that you spend the whole night in your own bed." I turned her toward me and looked her dead in the eyes: "It's the big girl thing to do," I said earnestly. "Only babies sleep with their parents at nightttime."
She thought about it for a few seconds. Then she looked at me.
"Okay, Mummy," she said.
And sure enough, it worked. With the occasional lapse, she began to spend the entire night in her bed ("see Mummy? I spent the night in my bed AGAIN!"). Marcus and I began to wonder what kind of idiots we were to have not tried this trick years earlier. We obviously praised her lavishly for her maturity. And life went on.
Of course, every morning, around 6:30 a.m., she still comes over to our bedroom, and sneaks into our bed. But hey, we have to get up in thirty minutes anyway.
And besides: I kind of missed her little sleeping form.
Karen Walrond is a writer and photographer in Houston, Texas. You can see more of her work at Chookooloonks.
