don’t ask!

When people ask me if my son is a good baby, I have a hard time responding. Most people are actually asking if he sleeps though the night and is generally easy. The answer to that is a resounding, “NO”. The problem I have is that if he isn’t a “good” baby by the sleeping/easy-o-meter, what does that make him? I guess my struggle to respond is more that I’m not comfortable with the opposite of “good”. My boy is a lot of things but he’s certainly not “bad”. He isn’t easy and doesn’t like to sleep much but he is squishy and lovable and has the best laugh ever. So if you see me in the grocery store don’t ask me if my munchkin is good, OK because that is just an awkward question that leaves me feeling weird.

I’m also starting to kind of hate it when, all be it, well intentioned people call me on a daily basis to see if he slept the night before. Except for a small handful of nights, he hasn’t slept more than 4 hours in a row since the end of September. Trust me, if he slept though the entire night you would know. There would be a major shift in the universe and you would feel it in your bones. We’ve done everything we know to do and he still doesn’t sleep. I’ve gotten our other two kids to sleep well and have had great success getting several so called terrible sleepers to have 3 hour naps on a daily basis in my day home but can not get my little linebacker to sleep. The fact is that he is hungry every 3 hours and nothing seems to change that. I’m not prepared to let my beloved little baby cry alone in his crib for an hour or more every time he wakes up just because someone else had success letting their kids cry it out. Not on my watch! So we will continue to hope that he’ll start to sleep better (hope as in the way we hope for debt relief for Africa, a solution to global warming…). I will also try to remember that the days fly by and before I know it he will be a wiggly 2 year old I’m trying to chase down for a hug (never mind a too busy to stop for a second almost 6 year old). Then I will be longing for the days that he loved to lay in my arms and nestle his face into my neck. I have years and years and years to sleep but only so many precious days to hold him in my arms.

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