Oh My God, The Baby Slept Through The Night
I thought this day would never come
I feel like an Olympic gold medalist. I feel like Dr. Frankenstein. I feel like a lottery winner.
This week, at a ripe 5.5 months old, my daughter slept through the night for the first time. [Please clap.]
That means no waking up and yelling for food, no needing to be changed, no waking up and wanting, just for shits and giggles, to spend half an hour to an hour making loud sounds that aren’t singing but also aren’t crying, or being carried from room to room by her dad like cantankerous royalty.
Until the fateful night I'd listened with dismay to stories from other parents of magical babies that slept through the night at five months, four months, even-- allegedly!-- three months. We'd tried a bunch of things that didn't work. We'd argued over methods and barometers for success. I'd felt the sanity drain from my body. I worried that our baby was just one of those babies that was destined to be a "bad sleeper."
But, then, some hope.
We went through our normal nighttime routine. Food. Bath. Pajamas. The food and bath parts of the night always go well, but in the past we’d hit problems when we arrived at the pajamas phase. Sometimes she reacts to the notion of having to wear pajamas the way the child of a famous person might when they have to stand in line outside a nightclub. “Do you know who I am? Do you know who my father is?” But on the night she slept, nothing.
We often hit problems at story time. Juniper has figured out that story comes before bed, and we don’t like bed, therefore we don’t like story. She tends to get angrier and angrier the closer we get to bidding Goodnight to the Moon. We have a sweet, beautiful picture book called Everywhere, Wonder that gets her incredibly revved up. Everywhere, Wonder is to my daughter what Rage Against the Machine was to a 90’s suburban teen about to get pulled over for going 70 in a 45 in his dad’s Izuzu Trooper. We’ve never made it through that book.
If pajama time and story time don’t cause tears, the moment she’s set down in the crib almost always does. But that night, she only complained for a few seconds.
And then, nothing.
I couldn’t believe how lucky we were that she was still sound asleep when we went to bed later and fully expected her to do that thing where I’m almost asleep when she wakes up, thus waking me up and requiring half an hour of feeding or changing or soothing to get back to sleep.
But no. Nothing.
I woke up later, confused. When I checked the time and saw that it was nearly 3 am, I bolted out of bed as quietly as I could to check on her. She was fine. Still sleeping.
I went back to sleep, waking a couple of hours later at 5 am. I did the same panic-bolt to make sure she was still breathing (Other parents: does this ever stop?). She was still sleeping. This time, I woke my husband up to marvel at the fact that we’d had a full night of rest– well I hadn’t had a full night of rest due to residual anxiety from literature about SIDS causing me to be unable to totally relax, but I could have theoretically had a full night of rest. And when I did wake up, I wasn’t awake for the half hour or hour it usually took to get her to go back to sleep.
About an hour later, I heard a thumping from her bassinet, which turned out to be her banging her feet on the mattress as she stared up at the ceiling, cheerful and rested but not in a particular hurry to do anything.
She slept! It was a miracle! I felt like a stock photo of a woman twirling with her baby in a field. I felt like (minor spoiler, kinda) Mark S. in the season one finale of Severance.
My happiness about her through-the-night sleep felt all-encompassing. Since becoming a parent, my world shrunk to such a tiny size that any developments within it feel seismic. I wanted to tell everybody (and now I’m telling all of you). I was closer to fully rested than I’d been in months. Is this how I used to feel all the time? Will I one day sleep again regularly? LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL.
Unfortunately, the following night, Juniper was back on her bullshit and woke up four times, each time in a worse mood than the last. But at least now I know that she is capable of sleeping 10 hours in a row, like a "good" sleeper, and that what we're doing to get her from being a "regular baby" to being a "good sleeper" probably isn't making things worse. And we have shelved Everywhere, Wonder until she's old enough to appreciate it.
Image via Shutterstock