Every single week someone emails me about getting their kid to sleep. Not because I am some sort of baby sleep wizard, but because for some reason my posts on sleep training pop up when you make frantic google searches at 2am while your baby is still trying to burn the house down. The emails all sound pretty much the same. It is either a sad, desperate mom who is ready to sleep train their baby or a sad, desperate mom who is not ready but just wants to say I’m not sleeping and this is the worst.
I have been both of these moms and I get it. The whole thing is hard and confusing and everyone just wants to do the right thing. My only real advice is this: give yourself grace along with an occasional babysitter so you can drive to the Panera parking lot and nap.
A few weeks ago I came up on the sixth anniversary of my blog launch, a fancy way of saying that six years ago I started sharing my very boring stories on pregnancy with my grandma and seven other readers while I waited for my first baby to be born. As the years have passed, much has changed. The Internet has gotten louder about parenting (blogs, Pinterest, Instagram). As for me, I have had two more kids and as a result, have become a lot quieter.
That said, I would love to have something to send to these dear, tired parents before my time as a mother to babies fades into nostalgia. As of today, in the year of our Lord 2017, I have gotten three very different babies to sleep and lived to tell the tale. For you moms who are doing that 2am Google, the rest of this post is for you.
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I am going to keep this simple because I am a simple person with a simple brain who does not like instructions with more than five bullet points. Once I tried to assemble a crib by myself and after 45 minutes of profanity, threw all the tools into a pile and told Austin if he didn’t do it, the baby could sleep in the laundry basket for all I cared.
So, you want your baby to sleep.
I am not going to tell you how to make that happen because you already know how. I know this because if you are desperate enough to read a blog post by a random mom about her kids sleeping, you’ve already read all the books and articles and forums on the correlations between college test scores and sleep trained babies. I am going to tell you what this ultimately comes down to which is: is it okay to let my baby cry?
The short answer is yes.
The longer answer is yes, but isn’t it so terrible? No one tells you that someday you will have to let your precious, darling baby cry on purpose like an abandoned puppy left at the pound. But I guess that’s because if someone told you all the worst parts of parenting, you might need a Xanax-and-tonic to digest. The first time I did it, I waited until my son was 14 months old. The next time I waited six months because I knew waiting longer would make things much worse.
I have deleted most of my blog posts on parenting, but the sleep ones remain because I am still close enough to sleep training babies to remember how much it helped when another mom told me it’s okay to let them cry. So let me say it again: It’s okay when you’re ready and they’re ready and everyone is ready to have a Beyonce grade night of sleep. Just remember the old latin proverb that says if you sleep train a 5-month-old and potty train a 2-year-old in the same week you will die.
Lastly, I want to say that there is a difference between newborn sleeplessness and a six month old who wants to throw a 2am rager at the milk bar. If you are stuck in the former, may god bless you with coffee and an 1800s style night nurse who brings you a hot towel and then tucks you into bed for 12 hours (but probably just the first thing). +
Happy sleeping, friend. Someday it will all be a memory.
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PS: Parenting manuals are the worst, but if you really do need a suggestion on methods, etc–this is my sleeping Bible. May the force be with you.