Sleep Training

*Updated

She’s sleeping through the night and let me tell you, it’s about time!!! I know sleep training can be a controversial subject between Mothers but I had to do something. She was cranky and tired all day. Naps helped a little bit, when she took one. If she was able to fall asleep for a nap, everyone had to be perfectly quiet or she would wake up and be even more irritable than before. Night after night of her waking and not being able to put herself back to sleep was really taking its toll on the entire family. I had to do something. I needed some sleep!

Lucky for me, Stranger came home with the perfect cure just a few months ago and it has worked like a charm. Why couldn’t I have discovered it 10 years ago with my first baby? Just think of all the years of sleepless nights that I have suffered. At least there won’t be any more. Thanks to stranger I am finally able to put myself back to sleep when I wake up at night. Um, I mean SHE is.

Ok, it’s me. Lovely has been sleeping through the night since she was a week old. Well, why shouldn’t she? She doesn’t have to worry about library book fines or how to keep chickens from pooping on the front porch. She’s never built a house and lain awake at night wondering why the builders would put a door where the bathroom window was supposed to be and why the plumbers thought she wanted handicapped toilets.

I used to be a good sleeper. I spent my high school and college years traveling with sports and music. I could fall asleep anywhere and any time; on a bus sitting straight up or on a cold gym floor at the sidelines of a volleyball game. All of that changed when I got pregnant with my first baby. Suddenly my ears developed super human sensitivity to sound. Suddenly my brain refused to turn off for 8 hours in a row. Suddenly the night time hours turned into nights of sleepless horror with every tick of the clock. I dreaded the sun going down because I knew I would have to spend another exhausted night trying to sleep while my body refused to cooperate.

A few months ago Stranger brought home an MP3 player after I had mentioned it might be nice to have one to use at the gym. Of course it was on sale! You didn’t think he would just buy one out of love for me did you? It originally cost $100, it was on sale for $60 and then it came with a $40 rebate bringing the price down to $20. Apparently 80% off is almost as good as free to Bruno who was happy to show me how much he loves me while at the same time getting a good deal.

That is my WFMW. I have used my MP3 player to re-train myself to sleep through the night. I have a play list on it called Sleeping that plays thirty minutes of soft mellow music and I leave it ready and waiting right next to my bed every night. If I wake up in the middle of the night or even just an hour before I want to get up in the morning, I can put the ear phones in without disturbing Stranger, turn it on and fall blissfully back to the land of all you can eat cheesecake and kinder, gentler librarians who are actually delighted to share their sanctified books with you. I can dream can’t I?

My new Sleep Trainer works for naps, sleeping in hotels or visiting the cousins with their crowing roosters and crying lambs. I even took it to my physical therapy appointment today and took a 15 minute nap while I lay on a table undergoing some kind of wonderful shock therapy treatment. So in my usual way of overstating my point, get yourself an MP3 player, if you don’t already have one, and start dreaming again.

*Go visit Ann Kroeker. She has another great tip for using your MP3 player.

Here is another little detail for effective sleep training. If I'm using my player to fall asleep at night or to go back to sleep in the middle of the night then I set it to play through my 30 minute sleeping list once and then it turns off so I don't waste batteries. If I wake up an hour before I want to or if I want to take a nap in the afternoon then I set it to repeat one song over and over until I wake up and turn it off. The reason I do that is because the repetition of the same song keeps me sleeping when lights or other sounds would otherwise wake me up.

Can you tell that sleep is a very valuable resource in my house!