Oh No!

I was really hoping my son wouldn’t get my sleeping issues. I have sleep parasomnia. I have self-diagnosed myself with REM Sleep Behavior Disorder.

I like to call what I have action dreams, in that I play out the scenes running through my brain as I sleep.

I have been known to clear off dressers in search of missing items, walk throughout the house searching, in late, for my son who has disappeared and hold conversations with whoever likes to listen.

The worst is the terror. I have these realistic dreams, which cause me to shoot out of bed and when I eventually wake, my heart is racing. I figure one of these days, my poor heart is going to stop.

So I had hoped, even though I know these issues are hereditary, that my son would not experience the fear.

It’s awful.

But Monday night, I heard my two-year-old call out to me through the monitor. I came into his room and he was pointing to his stuffed animal in his crib saying ‘No Cosmo. No Cosmo in bed.’ I reassured him Cosmo, the kitten, was not in his bed as Cosmo was sleeping with me.

But the damage was down. It took me three hours to settle my guy back down and convince him he needed to sleep again.

I gave him the advice that, sometimes, works for me – think happy thoughts and tell yourself no bad dreams tonight.

Tuesday night, he was again up for several hours and a hour last night, but I think it was association rather than bad dreams.

For me, these terrors are worse when I am tired (a known trigger). My guy had a shorter nap Monday so I will be doing what I can to ensure he gets enough sleep so his dreams are peaceful.

Sleep Is For The Weak

I may have created a sleeping monster.

For the past week, my son has been up every hour. By about 3 a.m. he starts a pattern of waking as soon as I put him down. By 5 a.m. or 6 a.m., I am exhausted and started the bad habit of bringing him into bed with me to side nurse (we finally figured this out on our recent camping trip and it’s wonderful) and sleep for a couple of hours.

I haven’t been overly concerned about this hourly waking pattern as our little guy was cutting four teeth last week and if he needed extra attention, I figured he deserved it.

However, it has continued into this week.

So last night, I decided to let him cry it out for a bit.

It broke my heart. Our little guy is a tad stubborn (he gets this naturally I am afraid. Both my husband and I can be pig headed) and I gave up before he did but not before he screamed for what felt like a hour (I have noticed that in the middle of the night, what is a half a hour, feels like it’s at least a hour), cried with real tears and grabbed my neck to pull him up into my arms.

In the end, I picked him up and nursed him back to sleep and brought him back into bed with me this morning.

Before I got back to work, I have three options:

1.Understand sleep is for the weak.
I can continue this pattern and hope our son eventually gets a hang of this sleeping thing. In fairness to our to our little guy, he learned to sleep in his bed at nights and for naps.

2. Ferber.
I really hate this method. I know it works, but the thought of allowing my son to cry himself to sleep makes me physically sick. It brings back horrible memories of when he was sick, crying and struggling to live while I couldn’t pick him up, hold him or comfort him in any way. The thought of letting him cry it out so he learns to self-soothe just seems cruel.

3. Co-sleeping.
I enjoy cuddling with my husband in bed, chatting as we fall asleep and wake up. That’s hard to do when our son is in the middle taking up what little time we have for just the two of us.

So the end result is that I know our son will eventually need to be sleep trained but I am not at the stage where I think he has to give up night nursing. He is not even nine months old so I don’t think he really understands what milk is, never mind that he can’t have any more of it.

I am happy with our sleeping monster. And that is all that matters.