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Bedroom Tales

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I realize it’s been a little while since I updated on Pomme’s sleeping arrangements.  Basically, after the three days I previously blogged about, she went back to sleeping in her bed in our room for a couple days.  She had a cold and was cranky, who can blame her?

However, within a few days, she wanted back into her own room again, and has stayed there ever since.   I think that means it’s been a whole week in a row now?

Getting her to sleep is getting easier, as well.  I wouldn’t say easy, she still would obviously prefer to stay up!  But she doesn’t fight staying in bed.  She squirms and fidgets and fusses a bit, but never tries to get up and leave.  She’s completely co-operative as far as getting ready for bed and getting into bed — it’s just the falling asleep part she resists!

Most nights it has ended up being daddy who stays with her until she falls asleep.  When I stay with her, she sometimes just wants to nurse, and (sadly, I confess, with some sense of guilt but knowing I need it for my sanity) I’m deliberately weaning her from the bedtime nurse.  She will usually accept a glass of milk instead, and/or merely holding the booby (what a lifesaver that trick has been!), but sometimes she’s still just too wound up when it’s mommy around.

Of course, the occasional evening when daddy gives up on her EVER settling down, so I go in to take a shift — she settles for me practically instantly, leaving him shaking his head in bewilderment over my magic mommy powers.

And that’s how it generally goes… she fidgets, fusses, squirms, kicks, rolls, chatters, plays, and then as soon as she settles and stays still for more than about 5 seconds, she is OUT.  Asleep, off to dreamland, dead to the world, just like that.

She will stay in her room until anywhere from 1am until 7am, but usually joining us sometime between 3-5am, after going to sleep around 9-9:30pm.  After the adventure of her heading downstairs looking for us one night early on, we invested in a nice pressure-mounted baby gate to block off the bedroom hallway once we all go to bed.  Most nights she comes in to our room on her own, occasionally she wakes us up with a single cry — just enough to alert us to her state of wakefulness and await our arrival to rescue her.  She is not scared to wake up alone, not since the first night or two when it was new and unfamiliar.

Her bed in our room has quickly turned into a storage area for laundry waiting to be sorted, and a favourite nesting spot for the cats.  One more week of this, however, and we will move it into her room… the final step in the grand process of her achieving Nighttime Independence.

Well, technically I guess you could say the final step is when she stays in her room all night, every night, and even takes herself to the bathroom (usually she tells us when she comes in that she needs to pee so we just do a quick potty with the BBLP) and back to her own bed… But those are all things she will just do on her own at some point, and there’s not much we can do to either accellerate or delay it.  Moving her “real” bed into her bedroom is the last concrete thing that we need to do.

Just thinking about it, it feels so final, so like an ending.  But really, it’s a beginning, as she takes another big step leaving babyhood and entering true childhood.  And she will always be welcome back into our bed, whensoever she needs it.

           

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