Bedtime Dilemma.

“All you need is a belt of scotch,” my father suggests, “that’ll help out your bedtime routine.”

“For me or for the baby?” I inquire.

If there is one thing my wife and I cannot agree upon it is in the consistent implementation of our daughter’s bedtime routine. We have the easy part of the routine down. Around seven o’clock the bathwater is filled. For the next fifteen minutes it is wash and splash time in the sink; between 7:30 – 8:30 it is peekaboo time, block time, ball rolling time, music time, etc., and when she begins rubbing her nose and forehead back and forth on the play quilt it is story time. I love story time. The problem however, begins around 8:30 and on rare occasions lasts later than10 p.m. The bedtime separation anxiety our daughter experiences and the crying which follows at least three or four times a week is enough to break one’s heart and stretch one’s patience.

Putting our daughter down for the night has not always been an issue. For the first six months after our daughter was born we subscribed to the theory that our daughter will fall asleep for the night when she falls asleep. This method seemed to work perfectly for the first six weeks when she slept about as much as she was awake, before gradually falling out of favor. By the third and fourth month this method, known as systematic awakening, clearly was not working– but we had no choice. My wife, working part-time on the weekends and finishing up nursing school as a full-time student during the weekdays, needed her sleep. Me, I was working full-time and had a good friend who kept my caffeine drip filled throughout the morning, an excellent mentor teacher providing me with decades of sacred lesson plans, and enough teaching materials from prior employment, liberated resources (thank you RJH!), and life experience to at least slosh my way through the workday with puffy, bloodshot eyes and dragging feet.

Our daughter’s bedtime routine is complicated by the fact that she is still sleeping in our bedroom. I know, I know; her crib needs to be moved to another room. Unfortunately we are stuck in an old, small apartment and between what we want to do and what can be done. Sadly, our second bedroom is not heated. With the outdoor temperatures quickly dropping into the teens we feel we have little choice but to suffer the consequences of sharing our bedroom with our daughter.

I have read up on the different methods and techniques to put the little one down for the night, and boy are there are a lot of them! But putting her down is not the problem. The problem is keeping her down for the night. I subscribe to the cold turkey theory of slumber. While letting baby “cry it out” does sound harsh and cruel, it works– at least it worked for a little while. My wife, on the other hand, endorses the Ferberizing “conditioning” method. This tactic, named for Dr. Richard Ferber, involves repeatedly soothing and consistently decreasing the amounts of reassurance, in the forms of a back rub, pat or whisper of love, from mom or dad. From my point of view, the problem with the Ferberizing method is that it takes too long for the conditioning to condition, and it is much too easy when one is tired to scoop baby out of the crib, rock her back and forth, or put her on the our bed until she either stops crying or falls asleep from sheer exhaustion, which is exactly what we should not be doing at 9:30 at night!

I’m not saying that the cold turkey method works all the time, it hasn’t. While I have accepted that my daughter will probably cry a little if she is not as ready for sleep as I want her to be, the cold turkey method also too easily dismisses the signs and symptoms of other issues (teething, for instance) and chalks up the baby’s crying up to fussiness. And any set of parents can tell you a crying baby to a mother is comparable to pricking oneself with a tack– neither can be ignored for a prolonged period of time. So what is the solution?

In The Republic, Plato says it is impossible for one to know what they do not want without first knowing what they want. I know that when nine o’clock rolls around I am more than ready to place our daughter down for the night, turn on my 15 watts reading light, open one of the novels sitting on my nightstand and relax for the next hour. I have accepted that my daughter will probably cry a little if she is not as ready for sleep as I want her to be. I can accept that; my wife cannot– hence our bedtime woes.

As we struggle to compromise or find an absolute solution to our bedtime dilemmas, pray for us. Pray that our daughter will miraculously be able to read our minds and fall asleep at the convenient hour of 7:30 p.m. and sleep, uninterrupted, until 7:30 the following morning; or pray that we are blessed with the knowledge of figuring this problem out; or pray that someone out there knows what we should be doing.

Doesn’t she know that sleep is a good thing?