Sleep Tight

Well, BG is in a much better mood this morning. She slept a long time last night, which is a really good thing. We've been working on transitioning her sleeping this week, and I think it's starting to catch on...

Originally, we had BG in a "co-sleeper" in our bedroom. Since my wife was nursing, it was *very* convenient. She could grab BG, nurse her, and then go back to sleep while I pleasantly snored away. Okay, that's not true... I actually got up and did the diaper change. We agreed to share duties, and if my wife had to get up in the middle of the night, well, I did, too. It really wasn't that bad. My wife would wake up, nurse her, then wake me up, I'd change her and then she'd go back to sleep. An equitable division of labor.

As BG started sleeping through the night, we still kept her in the co-sleeper. We tried moving her into her crib a few weeks ago, but my wife and I both missed having her so close, so that experiement ended. But recently, BG has been having trouble napping in her crib--she's started to think of the crib as a play area, not a sleep area. So we decided it was probably time to have her start sleeping in there at night--to drive home the point of crib==sleep. If that is even possible with a baby.

So, we read the manual of the baby monitor which we had not used until now and we started to sleep her in her crib. At first, it didn't go so well. Neurotic parents combined with crabby baby makes for a difficult transition. But we have a consistent bedtime routine: a feeding, followed by a bath, followed by a story or two with daddy, and then swaddling and being put down by mommy. We've stuck to it now for the week, and now BG seems to be cool with sleeping in her crib. She's napping in their during the day, and she's going her full night (7:30 to 6:30) which is pretty damn good.

In some ways, I like it. I like being able to read before bed again (not having to turn out the light so I don't wake the baby). But in other ways, I don't like it. I really do miss having her near us. I miss her, even though I'm asleep. Yes, the monitor works fine, I can hear easily if she wakes up--it even has an alarm if the temperature in her room gets too cold or hot. But it's just not the same as her being there. I suspect most of my issue is that it marks a transition--she's no longer an "infant" where we need to be there for her every second. She can now be apart from us for the night (even though we're not _really_ apart). It's just a reminder that someday, she'll go off on her own... which is both good and sad. And a long way off, so I suppose I don't have to dwell on it now.