When Axel was a baby, I was obsessed with sleep: who was sleeping (not my baby), who wasn't (me), how to get him to sleep (nursing, rocking, singing), and how to get him to stay that way (prayer and voodoo). When you don't sleep, it's all you can think about. Babies, I realized, are crazy. I even viewed all mothers who claimed their babies slept with some suspicion, especially those who slept through the night by four months - were they lying to me? Had they just forgotten, five or twenty-five years later? Had sleepy little aliens snatched away their human babies, replacing them with identical pod babies who snoozed for twelve hours straight?
Well, now I know the truth. They weren't lying. It's not aliens. There are real, live human babies who sleep more than two hours in a row. One of them lives with me.
I've been afraid to tell you this, for fear it might jinx it. I'm rubbing my luck rabbit's foot and knocking on wood and providing offerings of pink marabou-trimed slippers and expensive organic cotton mattresses to the sleep gods as I type this. But here it is: my youngest son actually sleeps.
Jonas consistently sleeps a six to eight hour stretch, and then he'll go back for another three or four hours. He sleeps until 7:00 or 7:30 in the morning. Even more amazing, I can put the child down while he's almost asleep, and sometimes he'll actually sink into slumber. His slept through from 9 pm - 6 am a handful of times.
I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. After my wakeful older son, I assumed that any child with my genes would be up three or more times a night and wouldn't sleep through the night until he was a year, or older.
I'm not quite sure why Jonas sleeps so well. He's living on mama's milk, just like Axel. He's about the same size. We turned Axel into a burrito with swaddling wraps every night, just like we do with Jonas. Both have loud humidifiers for white noise. Jonas sleeps in the top of the Pack N Play in our room, as Axel did. The one main difference? I can't always come running right when Jonas squeaks and cries, especially on all the nights that I'm alone with the two of them. So, Jonas has been given a few minutes here and there to put himself to sleep, not out of any master sleep plan but simply because I can't be two places at once and I don't yet have Go-Go Gadget arms. Oh, and I got an earlier start on the one thing that seems to have worked for Axel (who is now, at almost two, finally a sleep champion) - a more consistent bedtime routine, although calling it a "routine" is a bit of a stretch.
Mostly, though, it's luck. Jonas came wired to sleep a bit more at a younger age. For that, I am deeply, deeply thankful. It might not last, and there will be nights of frequent wakings from teething or illness or the boogieman. I'm savoring all the shut-eye while I can.
