But occasionally, she stays in her room until we go in and get her (or she comes to get us, saying “wake up mommy!”).  Last night was one of those nights.

So I got a good night’s sleep, right?

Wrong.  Exhausted and looking forward to a great slumber, I ended up with an all-nighter IBS attack.  No pain, just nauseous and unsettled enough so that I couldn’t sleep.  Then I’d have to run to the loo and spend some quality time there.  When I start falling asleep on the pot, I head back to bed for a quick snooze.  But 1/2 hour later, I’m awake and dashing back again.

Sometimes this goes on for a couple hours.  Then whatever was causing the trouble passes… and I sleep peacefully the rest of the night.  Other times, like last night, I’m back and forth until 5am.

I’ve learned to roll with it.  I don’t fret and despair, I just take a book and camp out in the bathroom for an hour at a time.  But seriously, 5am?

So I’m functioning today on about 3 hours sleep — not consecutively.  The rain all last night was very pleasant to listen to, though now there’s a swamp in our back yard.  Pomme’s in great spirits today after her long sleep.  I guess she stole mine.

It was actually hubby who realized she was up.  She didn’t cry this time.  What he heard was footsteps — going downstairs.  He got up to check, and sure enough, she had gone down the hall, squeezed past the barrier we’d set up (since we don’t have a gate we had just put up a large box, as a deterrent/reminder rather than a full out barricade), through the kitchen, and all the way downstairs.  As soon as she saw him, she started crying.  I guess pent-up nervousness released when daddy came to the rescue.

There is some logic to her going downstairs.  Often, if she goes to bed early and wakes up before we’ve gone to bed, she’ll come looking for us downstairs… because that’s where we are.  So I don’t believe she was sneaking downstairs to play.  I think she just didn’t realize that we were in bed, and was heading down to look for us.  The fact that all the lights were out didn’t register as important to her toddler’s brain, apparently.

So that was the second night.  Still mostly successful, although she had still protested bedtime quite vehemently and taken a long time to settle down.

That brings us to last night.  This time, when we first suggested that it was bedtime, she protested again — but quite quickly said “okay” and agreed to come get ready without any more fuss!  We asked her if she wanted to sleep in her own room or in mommy and daddy’s room, and she answered, “No!  I don’t want to sleep!”  Heh.  An honest answer!   But that was as far as the protesting went.  We then said to her “I know you don’t want your day to end, but the sun is down and it’s time to go to sleep.  Which room would you like to sleep in?”  She answered her own room.

A significant difference about last night was that we started the routine in her own room and bed right away.  The first night, the move to her room was after a good half hour or so of her struggling in her bed in our room, and her request to move was a complete surprise, totally out of the blue.  The second night, we were about to put her into her bed in our room but she protested that she wanted her room.  The third night was the first time her preference was made clear before the bedtime routine even started, so we began the whole procedure with that in mind, rather than as an uncertainty or a surprise.

Now that all of us — parents included — are starting to get the hang of a routine that works for her, it was getting easier.  She wasn’t happy about getting her teeth brushed, but cooperated.  She peed on the toilet happily.  She actually climbed into bed willingly, with a smile.  We read a book together.  She wanted to read it again, but I declined, saying once was enough because it was time for sleep, and she said okay!  She had a glass of milk and asked for more, but once again we told her it was enough, and once again she said okay!

And then she settled down, almost right away.  A little bit of squirming, a little chatting with her dolls, but no actual fussing, no whining, no kicking or crawling upside down.  She stayed lying down, cuddled up in her blankets. Daddy lay down with her, and she wanted me to just sit beside the bed.  She had a little whispered conversation with daddy, about how there are lights in every room in the house.  Then daddy said “time to sleep, no more talking”, she said “okay”, and in three long slow blinks, she was asleep!

Hurray for such a calm, peaceful, and happy transition to sleep!  That’s about the first time ever, at least since she became aware of the fact that sleep=no more play.

She ended up sleeping until 3am, so not her record, but she did come straight into our room this time, without any crying either.  Nursed straight back to sleep and slept until 8:30 this morning.

We’ve decided that if she chooses to sleep in her room for two weeks straight, then that will indicate a likely permanence to this new location, and we’ll move her “real” bed into her room (which is actually a little smaller than the mattress on the floor and has storage space underneath, so she’ll have more room in her room!) and move the mattress into our room for awhile, for “just in case”.

Yesterday was also her very first dance class ever, and she just proved yet again how she’s turning into such a big girl.  But that’s another post…

I posted last night about how sweet little Pomme, not yet three years old, asked to go to sleep in her own room.  Not only asked, but also accomplished.  I wasn’t sure what was going to happen if she woke up during the night.  Would she be disoriented?  Scared?

Well, in fact she slept soundly until 6am.  That’s when hubby and I were awakened by a short little cry.  Before we even had time to get up and go to her, however, she had arrived in our room and was clambering up into bed.  Just one little cry was all she let out.  She seemed a little bit scared, and when I asked her if she was scared to wake up by herself in her room, she said yes.  But when I also asked if she had a good sleep and liked it in her room, she also said yes.

She nursed back to sleep cuddled with me, and we slept until 9am.  Hurray for homeschooling and sleeping in!

So the next question was going to be, what happens tonight?  Will she want to try it again, or was it a one-off?

When bedtime came around, she was pretty cranky, and announced quite strongly that she did not want to sleep in either room, thank you very much.  So we decided to keep things simple and just use her bed in our room.  So of course, then she says she wants to sleep in her room.

Like last night, it still took awhile before she settled down.  She helped her doggie doll go to sleep.  She had a glass of milk.  She wanted to read a book.  She wanted daddy.  She wanted daddy to leave.  She wanted daddy to come back.

But settle down she did, and fell asleep cuddled with daddy.

My first impression when she asked to go to her own room, was that it was another delaying tactic.  But if that were the case, then you would expect her to ask to go to our room at a later point, trying the same tactic again in reverse.  She didn’t do that.  Not tonight, and not last night.  Once in her room, she settled down fairly quickly and fell asleep comfortably.

And to add to the “growing up too fast” list — her first dance class is tomorrow morning.  Hopefully she’ll have a good night’s sleep!

Backstory:

She has a bed in our room.  We co-slept since birth, then around 14mo we added a sidecarred bed for her to start the night in.  We moved it across the room just a few months ago, when she was about 2.5yo.  She gets up and joins us in our bed about 25-30% of the time, the rest of the time now she sleeps all night in her bed — even resettling herself sometimes after sitting up awake in the night.

She’s also had a floor bed in her own room since we moved into this house a year ago. We used to use it for naps, just to get her used to the idea of sleeping in there, but she hasn’t had regular naps for a long time. When she does nap these days, we’ve just put her in her bed in our room.

We’ve been working on giving her a real ‘bedtime routine’ lately.  Up until recently, we would just nurse her down or wear her and go for a walk, when we saw that she was getting tired.  Now that she’s getting older, though – she’s 33 months – she’s become more resistant.  She wants to fight sleep, she wants to stay up and do stuff.  Nursing to sleep doesn’t always work anymore, and she’ll refuse to go in the sling because she knows what it means.

We found that we were staying up past midnight (we’re night owls so that in itself wasn’t a problem), with an overtired, cranky child who then was even harder to get to sleep.  So it was time to start a real “bedtime routine”, at a time when we thought she actually was tired but before she got overtired.

So around 8:30, we put on her pj’s, brush her teeth, maybe read a book, then go lie down in her bed in our room.  This last was especially a new part — normally we just let her go to sleep wherever, usually in our arms, and then plop her into her bed once she’s down.  Seriously, “plopping” best describes it.  I could practically throw her into bed and at most, she’d stir, shift, shuffle, and settle.

But with the previous nursing to sleep and cuddling no longer being a guarantee, it was time to ‘graduate’ to actually going to sleep in her bed!

She took to it quite quickly, with relatively little drama — at first.  Some nights, I nursed her down in her bed.  Other nights, we just cuddled.  She was usually upset at having to go to bed, but would settle within 5-10 minutes and drift off to sleep.

Then I decided I was ready to get rid of the bedtime nursing… it didn’t work for sleeping, in fact it tended to keep her awake, and I found it very irritating.  I’m trying so hard to let her self-wean, go as long as she wants to, and we’ve made it farther than I did with Flipper (I had weaned him just around 2.5yo) but I’m afraid that I’m hitting my limit.  I actually don’t mind middle-of-the-night nursing, but the bedtime one was time to go.  I knew that she didn’t really need it to get to sleep, there were so many nights that we didn’t use it at all, so it was just a matter of having that happen every night.

The first night that I actually refused (promising we’d nurse later), she took it well, just held the boob instead.  The second night, she cried.     That heartbroken cry.  We cuddled, I consoled, daddy cuddled, and she did eventually settle.  It actually wasn’t too bad – if she hadn’t settled quickly I would have let her nurse.  But she was okay.  She expressed her disappointment, then accepted the alternatives.  It still took her a little while to settle, but what we’ve noticed is that as soon as she’s able to hold herself still for more than 5 seconds, she drops out cold.  So it’s simply a matter of sitting with her and reminding her to be still, until she settles enough to let herself sleep.

Well, that was last night.  Tonight, I was proactive and offered a glass of milk before we even got to that stage.  She drank it up eagerly.  Then the squirming stage started.  She’d lie down, but play with her dolls.  Or sit up to grab a book that had fallen beside the bed.  Or turn around to cuddle with daddy.  Or stick her bum up in the air.  Or fiddle with her blankets.

Then she said, “I want to sleep in my room.”

I wasn’t ready for this one.  I thought it was probably just another delaying tactic.  We’ve suggested it to her before, asked if she’d like to try sleeping in her room, and she always said ‘no’.  That’s fine, I knew she just wasn’t ready yet.  But, since she asked… we went with it — we told her that she had to settle and be still, or we’d just come back to our room. She said okay, so we went with it.

Well, it still took her a few minutes to settle, but she did. And she fell asleep.

I’m actually not quite sure how to feel about this.  On the one hand, it’s great!  My baby is growing up, she’s secure and independent, we have even more privacy in the bedroom, and of course it’s “proof” that nighttime attachment parenting does not mean that your child will still be in your bed when they’re in college!

On the other hand, it’s harder to keep an eye on her.  She might decide to get up and play (in fact, before we went to her room, I talked about what would happen if she woke up in the night – to make sure she understood she could come into our room. “What will you do if you wake up and you’re in your room?” “Play!”) — or go wandering through the house unsupervised.  She’s recently managed to open the front door, even when it’s locked.  We’ll probably get a deadbolt or chain lock to prevent unwanted escapes, but we haven’t done that yet.  I might not sleep as well, knowing that she’s in a completely separate room.  I’ll be half-awake all night listening for her!

I knew this would happen eventually.  I was even looking forward to it in many ways.  I just wasn’t expecting this yet.

Well, we’ll see how it goes tonight… 10 to one odds I’m getting up at 3am to go rescue her when she wakes up and starts crying because she’s in an unfamiliar environment… And we’ve put a big box across the hallway so she doesn’t go wandering through the house, because we don’t have baby gates anymore!

And who knows what will happen tomorrow night.  This might be a one-time event, not to be repeated until she’s 6.  Or it might be the start of a gradual shift, some nights here, some nights there.  Or it might be the beginning of a sudden change, and we’ll end up moving her nicer bed into her room.  I honestly have no idea.

Whatever happens, though, it’s okay.  We’ve followed her lead.  I moved her bed across the room when I sensed, from her sleeping patterns, that she was ready for it, and sure enough she started sleeping all night almost every night and had no problems toddling across the room to me when she did need me.  And now we’ve put her in her own room, not for our convenience, or out of some sense of needing to force independence on young children… but because she wanted to.  She was ready to try it, on her own schedule and her own terms.  Once again, she proves that young children desire independence and will even demand it when they’re developmentally ready, all we need to give is the opportunity and the freedom to try things.  No pressure, no games.

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